Butterfly Bush Begone

The previous owners, during their landscaping of the front yard, planted a butterfly bush to the left of the driveway.

And to the right of the driveway.

There are two problems with this. First off, while the conical flower clusters look lovely and purple while they're blooming, they quite quickly go brown and crusty and then don't fall off, meaning that to keep the bush looking fresh I need to manually go in and prune them off, which is quite frankly a pain in the ass.

The other problem is the name. "Butterfly bush". It's like someone found some cheap weed that happens to maybe attract butterflies sometime and thought to themselves "how can we sell this to naive gardeners who put no effort into researching their plant choices?"

Long story short, I was not fond of these.

So off they go to the great compost heap in the sky. Or more likely the one on the ground somewhere.

In their place I had a thought to plant a pair of french lavender, which grow to a hefty 4 foot shrub and attract bees rather than butterflies. I already planted a spanish lavender a while back in the front corner of the yard, which is a smaller variety, and it took quite well to the conditions here.

Unfortunately the nursery didn't have a plain french lavender but rather a few smaller sub-varieties. They weren't excessively small though, so I picked up a pair of the Provence variety. They should grow to about 3 feet tall. Maybe. It depends on who you ask, some sources say only 2 feet. Either way I won't be too disappointed as the butterfly bush was honestly annoyingly large for the location, so being a bit smaller won't be the end of the world.

The important part is it's in the ground now.

And it should grow very, very well.

Speaking of growing, two of the lantana have started to recover.

While the other two remain quite dead. I haven't found a replacement for those yet, but the nursery suggests that in another month they might have some arriving.

The mexican heather has also popped back up after suddenly dying back.

So that's good, I suppose.