Newly planted Butterfly bush has yellow/burnt leaves- Help!

My butterfly bush has yellowing leaves and the ones near the base look scorched and burnt. I planted it several months ago. I removed the affected leaves and removed the spent blooms.

The dwarf firepower nandina are three years old and I recently tranplanted them. However they have never grown bigger than this size. I don't know what to do to get them to grow fuller.

I live in Zone 7 in Huntersville, NC. I regret to say I never had a soil test done. I know that I have some fungus problems in my lawn.

I love being outside and working in the gardening. Unfortunately, I'm still a beginner. I haven't found any books in the library that help and I always come back here for information. Thank you for any help.



This message was edited Jun 9, 2008 10:13 AM

Have you fertilized any of these? If so, what & how much?

Did you amend the soil?

In effect when you transplant you disturb the roots. They have to settle in and regain their support fuction. My guess is that if you clip off that inch or so the plant will be better ballanced. Once a week deep watering is better than a squirt or two a night.

Dwarf nandinas typically only get a few feet tall, so they may not get much bigger than that (it's hard for me to tell from the pic exactly how big they are though). Transplanting them didn't help in terms of getting them to grow, obviously if they were in a bad place and you had to move them then you had no choice, but now that they've been transplanted their roots need to start all over again on getting established, so if they're not at their full size yet you've likely got another year or two of them not doing much before they start to grow. Many shrubs follow the same rule as perennials...first year they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap. And since it's a dwarf plant anyway, even when they get to the leaping year they may not astound you with a lot of fast growth.

And for the butterfly bush it's likely either transplant shock, or if they've been in the ground long enough to get established then it could be a watering issue, I'd check the soil by sticking your finger down a few inches to see how it feels. If it's bone dry, then you probably need to be watering deeper and/or more often than you have been, but if it's feeling pretty wet then you need to cut down on your frequency and let things dry out a bit more in between. You might also check the mulch--if it's piled around the trunk of the plant that's not healthy, it needs to be pulled back a couple inches or else it can hold moisture against the trunk/stems and cause rot.

Aren't you having a terrible heat wave in NC? That's gotta be hard on new plantings, especially if you have a lot of hot wind along with it. Some mulches soak up all the water before it ever gets to your plantings too. Check the soil like ecrane3 suggested.

Also (and this will probably be very difficult for you to do), I'd prune off all the blooms so the plant doesn't have to support them and can channel all its energy into staying alive. Once it has recovered sufficiently, it will bloom again. Mine blooms all summer as long as I keep the blooms deadheaded.

My butterfly bush looked horrible the first year! I almost threw it out. But my aunt said to give it time and see what happens. Nothing happened the first year but I have to say this year it's big and beautiful and very healthy!

Good luck

A lot of plants start out looking ragged. It's hard sometimes to know whether to give up or give it time. I've learned to give it at least one year because, as raebeags said, that second year is almost always worth the wait.

Thanks for the help. It's so hard being patient.

When planting new plants, shrubs or anything ALWAYS WATER DEEPLY. It's probably the most common fault some people make. Keep the plant watered well for a few months.

A great book which has been a tremendous help to me is:

"The Well-Tended Perennial Garden" by Tracie DiSabato-Aust.

http://www.amazon.com/Well-Tended-Perennial-Garden-Planting-Techniques/dp/0881928038/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213279447&sr=8-1

It took a lot of the guesswork out of taking care of my plants.

Good luck!