Kindly sponsored by
The John Spedan Lewis Foundation
Andrew Large (2021)
Recommended citation
Large, A.T. (2021), 'Buddleja 'Summer Beauty'' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
A hydrid Buddleja of garden-origin with a combined B. davidii and B. fallowiana ancestry, but mostly resembling B. davidii in its features.
USDA Hardiness Zone 7-9
RHS Hardiness Rating H5
Buddleja ‘Summer Beauty’ is a hybrid cultivar raised at Horticultural Research International (Boskoop, Netherlands). It is a complex hybrid involving B. davidii ‘Fascination’, B. davidii ‘Nanho White’ and B. × ‘West Hill’ (itself a hybrid of B. davidii and B fallowiana); it can often be found listed simply as a B. davidii cultivar. ‘Summer Beauty’ is a full sibling of ‘Pink Delight’, but is not particularly similar. This hybrid is a fairly restrained Buddleja, not exceeding 2 m height and spread. The foliage is light green, tending to more glaucous in the emerging foliage. The inflorescences are smaller than ‘Pink Delight’, on average only about 20 cm long, with flowers of a deep cerise pink (Stuart 2006).
‘Summer Beauty’ has one of the brightest and most strikingly coloured flowers of any Buddleja, however, unlike most cultivars and hybrids, the plant is hard to propagate, having a low strike rate for cuttings and being slow to establish. Once mature, it still requires relatively more favourable conditions compared to its nearest relatives. These limitations have meant this hybrid is less popular and not so widely available as it might have been otherwise.