Buddleias, however, are everywhere, including places they shouldn't be - you often see them growing out of the masonry of neglected buildings. And they are everywhere on old railway land because the ballast resembles the riverside gravel where they grow in China.
But you never see buddleias mentioned in accounts of world war II bombsites. Here is a Guardian country diary from August 1946:
Many people in certain busy parts of London have recently looked about them in surprise at what at first appeared to be snowflakes drifting down before the breeze.
But when the “snowflakes” settled on sleeves or hats they were found to be the small parachute-like seed-carriers of the rosebay willow herb, which grows so profusely on any waste ground and particularly favours the bomb-scarred areas of the City of London.
A few days ago these dreary spaces were for a brief time magnificently clothed in rosy purple and here and there in gold where the Oxford rag-wort blooms. But now the beauty is fading and millions of seeds are being scattered far and wide by the wind.
No buddleias there, nor in this account of the exotic spaces the bombsites became from an essay on Rose Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness:
Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."
So the invasion of the buddleias appears to be a post-war phenomenon, but when exactly did it take place?
Perhaps they (like brambles) thrive on the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Buddleias were certainly well-established by the mid-1960s.
ReplyDeleteBuddleias are neither useful for food nor medicinally so they are unmentioned in most of the books on my shelves. I can't find 'Flora Britannica' (how can I lose a book that size?), but Phillips & Rix in 'The Botanical Garden' say that it was named after the Rev. Adam Buddle (c. 1660 - 17150 though they don't say whether he brought plants back to this country. What they do say, though, is that it "quickly colonised bomb sites in London after World War II". Maybe you could watch some of the 'bomb site films' again to see if you can spot it!
ReplyDeleteI've had a google, and there are plenty of pages saying buddleias were found on the wartime bombsites, but they do seem short on contemporary accounts. I'll have a look on the British Newspaper Archive and see if I can find any myself.
ReplyDeletePlus I don't remember buddleia being ubiquitous when I was young, so I still think its dominance may be a more recent phenomenon.
See my note at the start of the post!
ReplyDeleteI did try to leave a post earlier but the wicked trolls had done something to the interweb. I found a paper (academic not news) suggesting it colonised waste sites from the 1930s having first reached Kew in 1896.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much!
ReplyDeleteBuddleias (or Buddlejas as we are supposed to spell them) may be good sources of nectar for adult butterflies, but they are not eaten by butterfly larvae (caterpillars) and may out-compete better sources of caterpillar food.
ReplyDelete