Gaura lindheimeri, the wandflower whose pale blooms hover like a cloud of moths on the slightest breeze.
Gaura lindheimeri · Also known as Gaura, Whirling Butterflies, Wandflower, Oenothera lindheimeri
Most people meet this plant as "butterfly bush", and that's the name we use, even though botanists file it under Gaura (now Oenothera) and the name "butterfly bush" more properly belongs to Buddleja. The common name wins because it's the one gardeners actually say, and it perfectly describes the effect: dozens of small four-petalled flowers on wiry stems, dancing above the foliage like a settling of white butterflies.
It is one of the most useful movement plants we grow in Brisbane. Where clipped shrubs give a garden its bones, gaura gives it breath, softening hard edges and catching every passing breeze.
In a Brisbane garden
Gaura's reputation for being short-lived almost always comes down to wet feet. In Brisbane that means the plant thrives on a free-draining slope or a raised bed and sulks in a heavy clay hollow that stays soggy after summer storms. Get the drainage right and it shrugs off our humidity better than most cottage-garden perennials, which is exactly why we reach for it where an English favourite would melt.
It flowers hardest through the warm months and can look tired by the end of a wet, grey winter. A hard cut-back in late July or August brings it back denser and fuller for spring. In the right spot it will gently self-seed, welcome in an informal bed, easily edited out of a formal one.
How we design with it
Gaura earns its place in the middle of a border, threaded through firmer shapes so its haze of flower reads against something solid. It is a natural fit for the loose, biodiverse look we cover in our note on the naturalistic garden trend, and it lets a cottage garden keep flowering through a Brisbane summer that would flatten true English perennials.
Plant it in drifts of five or more rather than as single specimens; the movement only reads at that scale. Pair the white forms with silver foliage and deep green structure; the pink cultivars sit more quietly and suit a softer palette.
Where we write about butterfly bush
Common questions
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