What is this or what caused it?!

This is coming from my butterfly bush. I've already got a thread going about how it's been looking bad and been turning brown and possibly dying. Apparently it's not due to my over or under watering. ??? Help!

How old is it? I've heard that sometimes butterfly bushes are a semi short lived perennial. Perhaps you'd better take some cuttings.

from a report in Hawaii:"studies of B. davidii infestations in New Zealand have found that B. davidii is relatively short lived.... "

http://www.hear.org/starr/hiplants/reports/html/buddleia_davidii.htm

Well that's pretty crummy. It's only a little over a year old. I did take a few cuttings earlier this week, but I think I'll get a few more today. I cut this stalk off and thought I might find it rotten, but it wasn't. ?

It should live longer than a year. In TN I had the same butterfly bushes for about 10 years.

It should live to about 15 years so that can't be the problem.

10 or 15 years is SHORT lived?! I was thinking this morning that I know someone who has a bush that's about 8 years old, so I didn't think that was a short life.

I'm afraid it might have some type of borer. We planted a small veggie garden for my son this year and yesterday I found squash vine borers in the zucchini. I have veggie gardeners on 2 sides of me too. I've been watching and wondering what was wrong with this bush for over a week now, and then this. :( Oh well, I will just buy another one.

I meant relatively short lived. I don't think it's that short myself. Not like columbine or hollyhocks. I'm sorry for your buddelia. I love these perennials.

I wonder if "they" think 15 yrs is short lived, what is a long life? Thanks for the sympathy. I sure needed it yesterday. lol I got over the trauma today tho, and cut it down. It just looked so sickly that I figured I shouldn't waste any more time on it. It opened up a spot and gives me a chance to move things around, which is what I love to do!

Now those Columbine are something I might have to learn about or rethink next year. I had one that was fine one day, and brown and flat the next.

Wish that I could help, konkreteblonde, but the thing that I noticed about the picture was that cool wasp on the leaf there on the bottom middle of your picture - heh.

Since the damage seemed to come on suddenly, my guess is that it was most likely a disease. It seems that's probably what happened to your columbines as well. Usually the biggest insect pest of columbines is columbine leaf miner. They will make "trails" inside the leaves, but generally don't do enough damage to kill the plants and certainly not quickly. Mine get leaf miners often, and I just let them be. If they flower, yay - if not, I've got other flowers - heh. Flowers gotta be tough to stay in my garden, because I'm just as likely to be interested in taking pictures of the bugs eating them as I am of the flowers themselves. Hee!

Now my vegetable garden... that's a different story. I'll allow some chomping, but at some point, if it looks bad, I'll be getting out the pyrethrins (natural insecticide).

NB, tell me about that cool wasp. (your words, not mine) He's scary to me, but I don't think he's the red one that has the legs that hang down and creeps me out. One of them is the one that will purposely run into me. I guess they are just warning me? Thank God I've never been stung by any of them!!

The cool wasp looks like a Sphecidae to me. These are solitary hunting wasps that often dig nests in the ground.

As for your dive-bombing wasp, I'm not sure what your wasp fauna is in Texas. Here the usual culprits are the male carpenter bees. They can't even sting. They are just trying to act all tough like they can. I'm not saying that your dive-bombers can't sting, but in gereneral, yeah, they are just trying to warn you away from a certain area.

We had rain, rain, rain for about a week here in Louisiana a few weeks back when we had a tropical depression come thru connected with that last hurricane and my butterfly bush that was big and 3 yrs old up and died, just like that, it wilted and turned brown and died.....the soil in the bed that it was planted is has a lot of clay in it so I'm blameing it on too much water and not good drainaged.