The Perfect Time To Prune A Butterfly Bush

About This Episode

In this episode, The Grumpy Gardener advises a reader on the best time to prune a butterfly bush. Plus, he talks about the Blue Phlox, one of his favorite spring wildflowers.

Question Of The Week

"I live in Marion, North Carolina, in Zone 7B. When is the best time to prune my butterfly bush?" - Greg

Grumpy's Answer

Well, Greg, today would be great. Is that specific enough for you? Butterfly bush is a shrub that blooms on new growth that it makes during the year, and so if you have a butterfly bush and it's kind of getting big and lanky and growing all over the place, it's not so pretty anymore, now's a good time, either now or sometime in winter, to cut it back and cut back all those old stems and trunks that are coming up. They might be four or five feet tall, you might want to shorten those down to one or two and that will encourage a lot of new, young vigorous growth to come up and you'll get a lot more flowers. So, whenever a shrub blooms in the summer, you want to cut it back, generally in late winter or early spring. And this would go for other plants, too, as well as the butterfly bush. So, this pruning advice, this also applies to all the other summer-flowering trees and shrubs. It would be abelia, crepe myrtle, panicle hydrangea, the best-known of which is limelight, rose of Sharon and chaste tree.

Plant Of The Week

Blue Phlox

Let's talk a little bit about the plant. It's one of my favorite native wildflowers, especially because it provides colors of blue and purple that are kind of rare in the spring. And it's a wildflower. It likes to grow in light shade and it likes to have good soil, but it's not fussy. And because it's so showy, it blooms in the springtime, generally in March and April, the foliage kind of trails along the ground and roots as it goes, but then the flowers come up and they'll stand on stalks anywhere from, 10 to 15 inches tall and they have these big clusters of very showy flowers. And they're so showy when they bloom that if you go to a garden center, sometimes they'll dedicate an entire garden bench to pots of these because they'll be running out at the garden center. So now's a good time to plant them. Like I said, just light shade. They need some moisture during the winter and the spring. In summer, when they get established, they're pretty drought-tolerant, and they don't really have any problems, so you can expect a plant that's going to grow 10 to 15 feet tall when it's got the bloom stalks on it.

If after the flowers fade, you let the seeds form, they will reseed and start forming colonies around, so you get free plants that you could dig up and move to other places in your garden, so you might want to consider that.

About Ask Grumpy

Ask Grumpy is a podcast featuring Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener. For more than 20 years, Grumpy has been sharing advice on what to grow, when to plant, and how to manage just about anything in your garden. Tune in for short episodes every Wednesday and Saturday as Grumpy answers reader questions, solves seasonal conundrums, and provides need-to-know advice for gardeners with his very Grumpy sense of humor. Be sure to follow Ask Grumpy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you don't miss an episode.

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.