Matilda Smith del. · John Nugent Fitch lith. · Vincent Brooks, Day & Son Ltd · L. Reeve & Co., London
Week of 18 May 2026
Blue butterfly bush
Part 4 of 6 in Flowering shrubs
Rotheca myricoides (published as Clerodendron ugandense)
An African shrub whose flowers look like small blue butterflies in flight, four pale wings and a violet body with arching stamens for antennae.
- Published
- Plate 8235, volume 135, 1909
- From
- Curtis's Botanical Magazine
- Drawn by
- Matilda Smith
- Lithograph
- John Nugent Fitch
- Technique
- Hand-coloured lithograph
- Family
- Lamiaceae
- Native to
- Tropical and southern Africa
About the plant
Seen from a few paces, a blue butterfly bush in flower seems to have a cloud of small blue butterflies hovering over it. Each flower has four pale-blue lobes spread like wings, a fifth of deeper violet hanging like a body, and four long curved stamens and a style sweeping forward like antennae. The effect is so exact that bees and real butterflies are drawn to the flowers and pollinate them.
The plant grows on forest edges and in bushland across tropical and southern Africa, from Uganda and Kenya south to Mozambique, and plants sent from Uganda to Kew at the beginning of the twentieth century were drawn by Matilda Smith for this 1909 plate under the name Clerodendron ugandense. In the 1990s, DNA studies broke up the old genus Clerodendrum and this species was moved into Rotheca, and the whole group was transferred from the verbena family to the mints, where its square stems and paired leaves had been pointing all along.
In Britain it is a conservatory shrub, flowering from late summer into winter; in Australia and the southern United States it is grown outdoors and rarely out of flower.
Bought together
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