saw your post about the tropical milkweed, and wanted to add that butterfly bush is invasive and bad for our butterflies, despite it's name! it is not a host plant for any of our native species, and attracting them to it does not allow for reproduction. also, it can redirect pollinators from our native plant species, causing ecosystem problems as a whole. i thought this might be useful information for people to know, since the name trips people up and it's still being commonly planted!
I do find Butterfly Bush itself a bit frustrating--I know its invasive, but half the time when I'm trying to find an easy-to-reference list of suggested pollinator garden plants, Butterfly Bush is on the list. There's infertile varieties that can't reproduce--but they aren't always labeled as such, and even if you do have a variety that reproduces it's not always in your yard so you're not the one being affected by its spread per-say but it's still affecting the larger local ecosystem.
Though honestly half that problem is with big box stores/nurseries in general. Because sometimes people who want to start a pollinator garden aren't gonna google 'hey what should I put in a pollinator garden?' they just go to their nearest nursery and pick what looks pretty. Or they'll go to said nursery and ask someone working at that nursery what they should plant. And if the person working at that nursery knows a lot about pollinator gardening, that's grand! That's great! But also in either of these situations, if someone goes to a nursery like 'ooh I wanna plant things for butterflies! Oh! Butterfly bush! That's gotta be good for butterflies, right? Let's buy two!' what's gonna stop them? It's not like the nursery employees are gonna go 'uhm madam don't buy this plant that we sell and give us money actually'
And like people'll make the argument that 'oh people should do more research into native plants before they do things!!' or 'oh people should only shop at native plant nurseries how dare they buy from Lowes or Home Depot or Walmart or someplace!' but I cannot emphasize enough how much a lot of people A: don't even know or have heard of the concept of native vs invasive plants let alone would think to google that or B: are just busy and impulsive, and then also C: are not lucky enough to have the greatest native nurseries in the state down the street
Like invisible hand of the market convincing stores to stop selling invasive plants is not how things work that's never how things have worked that's like expecting the invisible hand of the market to convince manufacturers to use less plastic or treat chickens better.
I have gotten off topic. Butterfly bush also bad yes. Maybe I'll make a post that's like 'ooooh here are a big list of plants to avoid putting in your pollinator garden' or something but the funky thing about that is it'd also vary depending on where you are? Like I only know about the states and even then you've got some plants that are native in some parts of the states that you really shouldn't fucking plant like 2 or 3 states over, yknow?
Uhhhhhhhhhh im shutting up now
