Buddleia loricata

Buddleia loricata, the mountain sagewood, is a rugged evergreen from the high Drakensberg of South Africa and Lesotho, and one of the hardiest of all the butterfly bushes. Unlike the familiar deciduous buddlejas, this species holds narrow, crinkled, sage-like leaves the year round, dark green above and felted silvery white beneath. The species epithet loricata means clad in mail or armored, a nod to that tough, quilted foliage, while the genus honors the English clergyman-botanist Adam Buddle.

In the warm months the shrub carries dense terminal heads of small, sweetly honey-scented flowers, creamy white to pale yellow and often lit with an orange eye. Butterflies and bees work the fragrant clusters as they do on the common buddlejas, but here the show comes on an evergreen, mountain-tough plant rather than a rangy summer one. In the wild, mountain sagewood grows among rocks and in sheltered, moist gullies high on the slopes, well above six thousand feet.

That alpine origin gives the mountain sagewood an unusual toughness, shrugging off frost and cold that would cut down more tender kin, and standing among the most cold-hardy buddlejas in cultivation. Give the shrub full sun and well-drained soil, where the plant asks little once established and holds a neat, bushy form on non-invasive roots. Little known and still largely untested in American gardens, this is a plant for the curious grower and the collector.

Set Buddleia loricata where the fragrance and the pollinators can be enjoyed, in a sunny border, a rock garden, a low hedge, or a butterfly planting. The evergreen, silver-backed foliage earns a place even out of bloom, and the sweet summer flower heads bring in the winged traffic buddlejas are loved for. For a fragrant, frost-hardy, evergreen alternative to the usual butterfly bush, the mountain sagewood is a quietly rewarding choice.