Earlier this year I mentioned the excellent new dwarf hybrid buddleja from America both over on my RHS Trials and Awards blog, and also on my Transatlantic Plantsman blog. It's also bveen a big hit at the RHS Buddleja trial. It's not been available in Britain till now but as of yesterday you can order it from Gardening Express.
Buddleja 'Blue Chip' (Lo and BeholdTM Series) has a number of good things going for it:
* It's genuinely dwarf, I've not seen one much more than about 1m/39in high, oftenit's smaller.
* The flower spikes are in proportion to the size of the plant.
* It produces no fertile pollen and rarely produces seed when pollinated by a different buddleja - so there's no infuriating seedlings popping up everywhere.
* It thrives in containers.
* It flowers for a long period.
* It's scented.
* 'Blue Chip' was voted as the second most popular variety of Buddleja by the visitors to the recent comprehensive RHS buddelja trial.
You can find out even more by checking out this slide show on ‘Blue Chip'.
And as it happened, I was looking at a trial plant in friend's garden only yesterday and it was still flowering. My own trial plants are in a shadier spot and have finished.
'Blue Chip' (Lo and BeholdTM Series) is a hybrid involving B. davidii, B. davidii var. nanhoensis ‘Nanho Purple', B. globosa and B. lindleyana created by Dennis Werner of North Carolina State University.
Dr Werner started with two original parents: One was ‘Honeycomb', a hybrid between B. davidii and B. globosa, and the other was a hybrid of his own between B. davidii ‘Nanho Purple' and B. lindleyana. In 2001 he crossed these two together. They flowered in the summer of 2002 and all the seed was collected and sown. This was repeated twice until on 2004 one plant was selected - ‘Blue Chip'.
His aim was not only to create a genuinely dwarf buddleja, but also one which doesn't produce self sown seedlings. In the USA traditional buddlejas are banned in some states because their prolific seedlings are smothering native plants in some habitats.
Buddleja 'Blue Chip' (Lo and BeholdTM Series) is now available exclusively from Gardening Express.