Glamorous garden flowers and British native butterflies may not sound like natural bed-fellows, but it’s easy to have the best of both worlds. There’s a short-list of showy but butterfly-friendly border plants that urban lepidoptera-lovers shouldn’t be without. 

Buddleja davidii is THE butterfly bush, well-known for it’s ice-cream-cone-shaped flowers in blue-purple or mauve shades, though there’s also a very good white. In August, it’s covered with clouds of butterflies in several species.

The only slight drawback is that buddleja makes a big, spreading shrub, easily four feet wide and eight or more feet tall, even when you treat it to the correct severe annual pruning. If you grow the most compact variety, ‘Nanho Blue’, you can get away with a bush three feet wide and about six high, but that’s still pretty big for a small garden.  

Perennials are far easier to fit in. The ice plant (Sedum spectabile) is another butterfly magnet. Besides the old faithful ‘Autumn Joy’ with its flattish heads of rusty-pink flowers in late August and September, butterflies also rate the bigger showier Sedum telephium ‘Matrona’ which has softer rosier pink flowers starting a month or so earlier. Grow both, to extend the season.

For rockeries, tubs and even hanging baskets there are compact sedums such as the semi-prostrate ‘Bertram Anderson’ which has rich red flowers from late summer into autumn. Most nurseries and garden centres also stock other good ones – all very insect-friendly.
Butterflies are peculiarly attracted to flowering herbs, particularly marjorams, oreganos and thymes. If you grow the plants chiefly for their culinary qualities try to keep your hands off until after they finish flowering so the butterflies can enjoy them first. Once deadheaded, they’ll soon produce a strong new spurt of growth that you can cut for the kitchen.

When it comes to conventional flower borders the star butterfly plant – traditionally – was always the Michaelmas daisy. They aren’t grown so much nowadays since they got themselves a bad name for mildew and for flopping over, but today you’ll find plenty of compact, disease-resistant perennial asters with just as much butterfly pulling power. Look for Aster x frickartii ‘Monch’ (which starts flowering in mid summer instead of waiting till autumn) and New England asters (various named varieties of Aster novae-angliae). 
 
There’s also a favourite Edwardian flower that deserves a reprieve for its looks and butterfly appeal; scabious. Years ago, large-flowered varieties such as ‘Clive Greaves’ were great favourites with flower arrangers for their enormous rippled blue silky rosette-flowers; some varieties came in white. My granddad grew them on his allotment because grandma loved a bunch of them on the kitchen table.

They weren’t the easiest to grow well, making big untidy plants which could often only muster one or two blooms at a time, but nowadays there are newer varieties that make dense compact plants carrying masses of smaller flowers right through the middle of summer. ‘Pink Mist’ and ‘Butterfly Blue’ are especially brilliant. And butterflies seriously love them.  

If you’ve room after growing other butterfly magnets, you might add valerian, Verbena bonariensis and mint. Ordinary horse mint or spearmint are very insect-friendly when they’re allowed to flower, but the ultimate butterfly variety is the more unusual buddleja mint which has large conical heads of pale pink flowers, much like it’s name-sake. 

Every scrap of space counts in small gardens, so it makes sense to grow plants that earn their keep twice-over – and it gives you a warm glow to be doing your bit for wildlife at the same time as growing a glamorous garden.