''Buddleja davidii'' (spelling variant ''Buddleia davidii''), also called summer lilac, butterfly-bush, or orange eye, is a
species
A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...
of flowering plant in the
family
Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...
Scrophulariaceae
The Scrophulariaceae are a family of flowering plants, commonly known as the figwort family. The plants are annual and perennial herbs, as well as shrubs. Flowers have bilateral (zygomorphic) or rarely radial (actinomorphic) symmetry. The Scr ...
,
native
Native may refer to:
People
* '' Jus sanguinis'', nationality by blood
* '' Jus soli'', nationality by location of birth
* Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory
** Nat ...
to Sichuan and Hubei provinces in central China, and also Japan. It is widely used as an
ornamental plant
Ornamental plants or ''garden plants'' are plants that are primarily grown for their beauty but also for qualities such as scent or how they shape physical space. Many flowering plants and garden varieties tend to be specially bred cultivars th ...
, and many named varieties are in cultivation. The genus was named ''Buddleja'' after Reverend
Adam Buddle
Adam Buddle (1662 – 15 April 1715) was an English clergyman and botanist.
Born at Deeping St James, a village near Peterborough, Buddle was educated at Woodbridge School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he gained a BA in 1681, an ...
, an English botanist. The species name ''davidii'' honors the French missionary and explorer in China, Father
Armand David
Armand David, CM (7 September 1826, Espelette – 10 November 1900, Paris) was a Lazarist missionary Catholic priest as well as a zoologist and a botanist from the French Basque Country.
Several species, such as Père David's deer ...
, who was the first European to report the shrub. It was found near
Yichang
Yichang ( zh, s= ), Postal Map Romanization, alternatively romanized as Ichang, is a prefecture-level city located in western Hubei province, China. Yichang had a population of 3.92 million people at the 2022 census, making it the third most pop ...
by Dr
Augustine Henry
Augustine Henry (2 July 1857 – 23 March 1930) was a British-born Irish plantsman and sinologist. He is best known for sending over 15,000 dry specimens and seeds and 500 plant samples to Kew Gardens in the United Kingdom. By 1930, he was a re ...
about 1887 and sent to St Petersburg. Another botanist-missionary in China,
Jean-André Soulié Jean-André is a French masculine given name. It may refer to:
* Jean-André Cuoq (1821–1898), French philologist
* Jean-André Deluc (1727–1817), Swiss geologist and meteorologist
* Jean-André Mongez (1750–1788), French priest and miner ...
, sent seed to the French nursery
Vilmorin
Vilmorin is a French seed producer. The company has a long history in France, where it was family-controlled for almost two centuries, and today exists as a publicly traded company owned principally by agro-industrial cooperative Groupe Limagr ...
, and ''B. davidii'' entered commerce in the 1890s.
''B. davidii'' was accorded the
RHS Award of Merit (AM) in 1898, and the
Award of Garden Merit
The Award of Garden Merit (AGM) is a long-established award for plants by the British Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). It is based on assessment of the plants' performance under UK growing conditions.
It includes the full range of cultivated p ...
(AGM) in 1941.
[Hillier & Sons. (1990). ''Hillier's Manual of Trees & Shrubs, 5th ed.''. p. 47. David & Charles, Newton Abbot. ]
Description
''Buddleja davidii'' is a vigorous shrub with an arching habit, growing to in height. The pale brown bark becomes deeply fissured with age. The branches are quadrangular in section, the younger shoots covered in a dense
indumentum
In biology, an indumentum (Latin, literally: "garment") is a covering of trichomes (fine "hairs") on a plant or of bristles (rarely scales) of an insect.
Plants
The indumentum on plants can have a wide variety of functions, including as ...
. The opposite
lanceolate
The following terms are used to describe leaf plant morphology, morphology in the description and taxonomy (biology), taxonomy of plants. Leaves may be simple (that is, the leaf blade or 'lamina' is undivided) or compound (that is, the leaf blade ...
leaves are long,
tomentose
Trichomes (; ) are fine outgrowths or appendages on plants, algae, lichens, and certain protists. They are of diverse structure and function. Examples are hairs, glandular hairs, scales, and papillae. A covering of any kind of hair on a plant ...
beneath when young. The honey-scented lilac to purple
inflorescence
In botany, an inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a plant's Plant stem, stem that is composed of a main branch or a system of branches. An inflorescence is categorized on the basis of the arrangement of flowers on a mai ...
s are terminal
panicle
In botany, a panicle is a much-branched inflorescence. (softcover ). Some authors distinguish it from a compound spike inflorescence, by requiring that the flowers (and fruit) be pedicellate (having a single stem per flower). The branches of a p ...
s, < long.
[Stuart, D. (2006). ''Buddlejas''. pp 30–34. RHS Plant Collector Series, Timber Press, Oregon. ] Flowers are
perfect
Perfect commonly refers to:
* Perfection; completeness, and excellence
* Perfect (grammar), a grammatical category in some languages
Perfect may also refer to:
Film and television
* ''Perfect'' (1985 film), a romantic drama
* ''Perfect'' (20 ...
(having both male and female parts), hence are
hermaphrodite
A hermaphrodite () is a sexually reproducing organism that produces both male and female gametes. Animal species in which individuals are either male or female are gonochoric, which is the opposite of hermaphroditic.
The individuals of many ...
rather than
monoecious
Monoecy (; adj. monoecious ) is a sexual system in seed plants where separate male and female cones or flowers are present on the same plant. It is a monomorphic sexual system comparable with gynomonoecy, andromonoecy and trimonoecy, and contras ...
(separate male and female flowers on the same plant) as is often incorrectly stated.
Ploidy
Ploidy () is the number of complete sets of chromosomes in a cell, and hence the number of possible alleles for autosomal and pseudoautosomal genes. Here ''sets of chromosomes'' refers to the number of maternal and paternal chromosome copies, ...
2''n'' = 76 (tetraploid).
''Buddleja davidii'', after Leeuwenberg
In his 1979 revision of the taxonomy of the African and Asiatic species of ''Buddleja'', the Dutch botanist
Anthonius Leeuwenberg sank the six varieties of the species as synonyms of the type, considering them to be within the natural variation of a species, and unworthy of varietal recognition.
[Leeuwenberg, A. J. M. (1979) ''The Loganiaceae of Africa XVIII Buddleja L. II, Revision of the African & Asiatic species''. H. Veenman & Zonen B. V., Wageningen, Nederland.] It was Leeuwenberg's taxonomy which was adopted in the ''Flora of China''
[Li, P-T. & Leeuwenberg, A. J. M. (1996). Loganiaceae, in Wu, Z. & Raven, P. (eds) ''Flora of China'', Vol. 15. Science Press, Beijing, and Missouri Botanical Garden Press, St. Louis, USA.]
online at www.efloras.org
/ref> published in 1996. However, as the distinctions of the former varieties are still widely recognized in horticulture, they are treated separately here:
Cultivation
''Buddleja davidii'' cultivars are much appreciated worldwide as ornamentals and for the value of their flowers as a nectar
Nectar is a viscous, sugar-rich liquid produced by Plant, plants in glands called nectaries, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollination, pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to an ...
source for many species of butterfly
Butterflies are winged insects from the lepidopteran superfamily Papilionoidea, characterized by large, often brightly coloured wings that often fold together when at rest, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The oldest butterfly fossi ...
. However, the plant does not provide food for butterfly larvae, and buddlejas might out-compete the host plants that caterpillars require.
The species and its cultivars are not able to survive the harsh winters of northern or montane climates, being killed by temperatures below about .
Younger wood is more