Blue Chip Butterfly Bush
Buddleja ‘Blue Chip’ · a dwarf blue butterfly bush
A compact butterfly bush bred at NC State, with fragrant blue-purple flowers from midsummer to frost that butterflies and hummingbirds crowd, and deer leave it alone. It's effectively sterile, so it won't seed around like older butterfly bushes. Give it full sun and soil that drains.
- Mature size
- 2.5 × 2.5 ft
- 0.7 × 0.7 m, tall × wide
- Hardiness
- Zones 5a–9b
- USDA
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- Medium
- Blooms
- Jun–Sep
Blue Chip Butterfly Bush at its mature size
A mature Blue Chip Butterfly Bush grows 1 to 2.5 feet tall and just as wide.
Drawn to scale beside a 5 ft 9 in person. With VeraScape, you see it at this size in your own yard.
Typical mature size, unpruned. Sources: Proven Winners, NC State Extension.
Through the year
What Blue Chip Butterfly Bush looks like month by month in a typical zone 6–7 garden.
Dormant · Nov–Apr
Bare twiggy gray-brown stems.
In leaf · May, Oct
Silvery grey-green leaves, no flowers.
In flower · Jun–Sep
Short spikes of fragrant blue-violet flowers all over the mound.
Growing Blue Chip Butterfly Bush
- Grows well in
- The Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest, the Plains and Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest, and California.
- Growth rate
- Medium
- Good for
- Small space, foundation planting, deer resistant, pollinators, and fragrant
- Leaves
- Drops its leaves in winter
- Native to
- Garden hybrid
Spacing
VeraScape spaces plants so their grown canopies just touch. For Blue Chip Butterfly Bush, that’s about 2.5 ft apart, center to center.
Place a row in your own yard and VeraScape spaces them at their mature width, so you can see whether they’ll crowd the walk.
See Blue Chip Butterfly Bush in your yard before you dig
Visualize it at its true size, alongside the rest of your design.