Russian sage travels! Slowly, surely and surreptitiously.

Uh, if a Baptisia is too big for the spot, a Buddleia most certainly will be. This must be an exceedingly small area. Even my largest Baptisia, a very large plant indeed, takes up only about a 4 ft diameter circle.

Baptisia is a taproot plant...very long taproots. That's why they are so drought tolerant. A very well established plant hates being disturbed. So, if you dig deep enough to get the taproot it shouldn't return. Dig deep...I had a baptisia in CO that grew down to bedrock...no joke.

Hard for me to suggest a replacement plant without knowing its immediate neighbors, sun orientation, soil type, etc. Off the top of my head, gaura comes to mind but I know some in Z5 have had trouble getting it to over winter so you'd have to check locally. Very nice airly plant that's also drought tolerant & blooms continuously all season. I use them as fillers both in the ground & in pots.

/tricia

Russian Sage is beautiful!

It is beautiful, but it does indeed creep and the large size grows bigger than you might imagine (flowers over five ft. tall in my case). I'm trying to relocate my several Russian Sage plants to their own bed because they are killing everything around them. It's a hefty chore.

My Russian Sage isn't that big and it doesn't creep. I wish it did though!

All of my Russian sage have gone to new homes, as they just got to big for the space available. I also have fairly rich soil and then they flop. The smaller variety, I think it's Little Spires does not flop and does not seem to spread as much. Also not quite as showy IMHO.

Well, my husband got the baptisia out and said it did not have a tap root but many smaller roots that he just cut through. We shall see what happens next year. Before I read your last 3 comments, we went and bought some russian sage. Now I wonder. It is in a bed surrounded by rudbeckia, echinacea, robert poole phlox, moonbeam coreopsis and shasta daisy. It will have a space that will allow it to branch out to 3-4 ft. and it would be okay to be 4- 4 1/2 ft. tall as the phox is very tall. We live in Pennsylvania and have fairly rich soil, so now I am concerned that we have a plant that will be uncontrollable and that flops. Any consolation? jnfr, when you say it is "killing everything around them", do you mean by the creeping roots? Flopping we can deal with by staking, but killing surrounding plants would be terrible.

Russian Sage should do great there. In fact, I have had it growing with Echinaceas and roses. It hasn't crowded them at all. I cut it back to 6 inches tall every spring. Mine had a few seedlings, but I dug them and put them in other places. There is no plant that compares to these!

Echinaceamaniac, you are encouraging, but you are in zone 7 and I am in zone 5. My next door neighbor does have these in her front yard, but they are on a very steep slope and she never waters, so it would be a very different situation from mine in a level bed that needs water for the surrounding plants. Maybe I am worrying to much. We have found that you never know until you try. Have gone through many trial and errors in other beds. We have 25 beds all with different environments and maybe a hundred different kinds of plants. I guess I am tired of trying and trying, plus the expense of it all.

I used to live in PA (Mechanicsburg z6). The Russian Sage I had there didn't do anything for the first two year then it started sending runners out. It wasn't horrible but it would have definitely needed an annual dig out of the runners to stay where I had it. I opted to move it instead. It may work where you are thinking but it may take a bit of work to do so.

The other option of a butterfly bush may work. I had one of those and pruned it as a sort of multi-trunked standard. I cut the trunks to about 4 feet high and rubbed all the sprouts off of them up to the top 6 inches or so. This let me have the fullness of the butterfly bush without it eating up as much real estate as it would have otherwise.
Here is a picture of it in early spring.
{{gwi:248065}}