• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Home Garden Joy
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Start Here
    • Seed Starting
    • Composting Basics
    • Vegetable Gardening
    • Growing Fruit
    • Growing Herbs
  • Recipes
    • Canning and Food Preservation
    • Vegetarian Meals
    • Salad Recipes
    • Soup Recipes
    • Dinner Recipes
    • Dessert Recipes
  • Books & Classes
    • Classes
    • Books
    • Books for Christian Herbalists
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Awards and Accolades
    • Privacy Policy

Scabiosa Butterfly Blue Perennial

May 28, 2012 by Jeanne

Scabiosa “Butterfly Blue” attracts butterflies and withstands drought once it is established. It’s a great plant for southern gardens.

Plant Profile: Scabiosa “Butterfly Blue”

Among the perennial flowers for butterfly gardens, Scabiosa “Butterfly Blue” is one that is easy to overlook in my garden – until the butterflies arrive en masse. Scabiosa is a genus of flowering plants known for their nectar-rich blossoms.  The flowers can be the typical blue (some people call it a light blue-lavender color), white or pink.

They need full sun, and they tend to bloom profusely once the hot weather arrives.  Here in Virginia that means a LONG blooming time! They don’t mind drought once they become established, and they make nice edging plants.  They only grow about 6-10 inches tall, and you can easily line a walkway or border with them.

Kits Included Butterfly Plants

My own plants arrived as part of the sunny perennial flower garden kit I purchased from a catalog in 2008.  We followed the suggested garden design map that came with the plants, and so they are grouped in little arrangements of 3 plants that I find more attractive than lining them up like soldiers marching along the border. My garden tends to be informal and messy, so this works better for me than a more formal arrangement.

Transition from Spring to Summer

One of the reasons I like this plant is that it helps my garden transition from the spring colors into the summer colors. Colors tend to go in waves in my garden. Early spring brings pinks and lilac colors throughout the garden, with yellow as an accent.

Around this time of year – late May, early June – the pinks and lilacs transition into the hot yellows and reds, but I have some purples and blues to cool down all those hot tones.

That’s where the Scabiosa comes in. It’s among the Gaillardia, which has so many orange-yellow flowers that it can overpower that part of the garden. The neat little pincushion blue Scabiosa flowers, about the size of a quarter each, just add the right shade of coolness to the “hot” colors of the garden.

Butterfly Magnet Flowers

I love to grow flowers that attract butterflies, and that’s the best part of growing Scabiosa – butterflies! Today when I stepped outside to see what I could photograph, one butterfly (I think it’s a Painted Lady) happily posed for mees.

Jeanne
Jeanne

Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.

Tweet
Share
Pin
Share
0 Shares

Filed Under: Birds and Butterflies, Flower Gardening

Previous Post: « Peonies in the Garden
Next Post: Growing Gourmet Lettuce and Micro Greens »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. ~Gardener on Sherlock Street

    June 7, 2012 at

    You captured the butterfly on a complimentary color. It really shows both of nicely.

Primary Sidebar

Let’s Connect!

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • YouTube

Featured

logo of the american horticulture society

Home Garden Joy was featured by the American Horticultural Society on #plantchat.

My Books on Amazon

cover of plan and build a raised bed garden

Visit my author page on Amazon to find all of my fiction and gardening books.

Herbal Academy Teachers

Footer

a browned overcooked coconut bar on a blue flowered plate

Recipe Fail – Coconut Bars

Each weekend, I dig out my favorite cookbook – the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 13th Edition. I flip through the pages, skimming the recipes, checking to see if I have the ingredients to make those that catch my eye. And then, I make the recipe, usually late Sunday afternoon after all the chores are done. It’s…

Read More

peach tree cuttings in a pot on a windowsill

Propagating Peach Trees from Softwood Cuttings

We decided that propagating peach trees from softwood cuttings was the way to go when we couldn’t find the variety we wanted at the store this past week. The best eating peach we’ve ever grown here at Seven Oaks Farm is “Red Haven.” It was recommended by our neighbor, a man whose family has farmed…

Read More

soul in a yellow mug against pine panelling

Made From Scratch Chicken Vegetable Soup Recipe

This is the best made-from-scratch chicken vegetable soup recipe you’ll ever taste. It’s a favorite of my family and I’m betting it will quickly become a favorite of your family’s, too. As part of my ongoing quest to test and taste every recipe in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook 100th Edition, I’ve made the Vegetable Soup…

Read More

A loaf of bread on a plate

Water Bread – Recipe Review

Once you make water bread, you’ll never eat store bought white bread again. In fact, you won’t be able to look at a loaf of “white bread” from the market and consider it bread, in any sense of the word, after you’ve taken a bite of the real thing. Hot. Crunchy crust. Tender, flaky, soft…

Read More

Copyright © 2022 Home Garden Joy on the Foodie Pro Theme