Dogtail Buddleja asiatica
Dogtail is an introduced perennial tree, found in Hawaii. It grows to 8 ft.
More about this plant
Buddleja asiatica, also known as dogtail, is a species of flowering plant in the figwort family, Scrophulariaceae. It grows in open woodland at elevations < 2,800 m either as understorey scrub, or as a small tree. First described by Loureiro in 1790, B. asiatica was introduced to the UK in 1874, and accorded the RHS Award of Garden Merit in 1993. It is highly invasive in Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Height
- 8 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Buddleja supports ~1 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Buddleja in North America, including:
✦ Bees 4 bee visitors
4 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Dogtail :
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Dogtail — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Buddleja →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (22) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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