Description
Purple Bells is an evergreen shrub which is fast growing in the sun or semi-shade. It grows to about 1.7m tall and has a spread of 1.5 meters. The beautiful violet flowers occur in summer and whenever I see them I wish that I could paint them accurately. The flowers are trumpet shaped and have purple blotches in the throat. They attract butterflies and it is the larval host plant for the Marbled Elf, Small Marbled Elf and the Gaika Blue butterflies. It would be pretty in a container or planted next to a water feature or pond. They are drought tolerant. We have used it successfully as a screen, a very beautiful one when it is in flower. Keep cutting the top few leaves and this will force the plant to send out new branches. I’ve seen it hedged and it responds well to pruning. It looks lovely at the back of a mixed bed and is pretty planted in the shade along with the Pistol Bush Duvernoia adhatodoides and the Forest Bell Bush Mackaya bella which has now been renamed Asystasia bella. The name is derived from the Greek dys=poorly and khoristos= separated. The stigma is only weakly bilobed.
