Gardeners wanting to attract butterflies to their yards would be wise to try Chinese abelia (Abelia chinensisAbelia chinensis). This 6-foot-tall shrub produces an explosion of white, spiky trusses in late summer and fall and is a welcomed sight for our beautiful winged friends. But making its way into our American gardens was not an easy journey for this butterfly-loving plant. …
Chinese abelia produces a profusion of blooms in late summer that butterflies can’t resist.
Photo Credit: Gerald L. Klingaman
‘Canyon Creek’ abelia is a new Chinese abelia selection produced by Dr. Michael Dirr and his students at the University of Georgia.
Photo Credit: Gerald L. Klingaman
Abelia is named after Clarke Abel (1780-1826), a surgeon and naturalist on the second unsuccessful British embassy to China in 1816. The embassy was attempting to obtain more favorable trading privileges for the English East India Company, which was finally accomplished by the Opium Wars 20 years later.
Abel collected specimens and seed of the plant – later named Abelia chinensis in his honor – while he and the embassy were being politely, but firmly, ushered out of the country along the Grand Canal. On his return voyage, Abel’s ship struck an uncharted reef, and the party found itself shipwrecked near present-day Sumatra in Indonesia. A seaman, acting on the orders of one of the aristocrats on board, dumped Abel’s 300 packets of seed into the sea so that his clothes could be saved.
The day after the wreck the men managed to retrieve some of the plant specimens, only to have the small boat they were now using attacked and burned by pirates. While Abel returned to England empty-handed, he was fortunate enough to have left duplicate specimens of some of the plant material with an acquaintance in Canton. These duplicate sets were returned to Abel and used to establish the plant as a new member of the honeysuckle family.
Abel’s abelia was finally introduced into England as a living plant in 1844 by Robert Fortune. It wasn’t until a hybrid cross of the plant was introduced in 1886 that Abelia chinensis fell from the trade. Fortunately, with the explosion of interest in “new” garden plants in the 1990s, the original species made its way back into gardens as a prime attractant for butterflies (and this time, no pirates were involved).
