Lilac blooms once, and may do so at a time that is not particularly hospitable to sitting out on the deck, depending on the variety you get. Once it has bloomed its isn't the most attractive bush and at least in our part of the mid-Atlantic prone to leaf-disfiguring diseases. The butterfly bush, by contrast blooms, most of the summer, but its foliage is weedy for close up. Attracts a lot of butterflies, bees and wasps. Consider chaste tree (Vitex) attractive summer foliage and spikes of color in the middle of the summer. It will get that big, if you let it, but is easy to keep smaller. (Cold winters will keep it small by "pruning" it for you.) Sadly its scent is a negative. 8 X 8! why plant Just one thing? That is enough space for 1 biggish bush and several smaller shrubs that would let you trade off bloom times, foliage and other things. So you could have a viburnum for spring scent and summer flowering caryopteris, which in my garden attracts many moths and butterflies. In a public park I saw a white butterfly bush surrounded by Gaura (a perennial) called whirling butterflies. The whole effect was quite nice. Gaura here bloom all summer.

At this point your best bet may be to cut them to the ground and say your prayers, because, as Tricia said, these shouldn't be cut until they start growing in spring. On the other hand, I once had a Vitex that didn't leaf out until July 4, so it's possible that you'd be better off waiting. Don't know where you are in CT (what zone) but here on Cape Cod they reseed like mad if they're not dead-headed, so you might want to be on the lookout for volunteers.

These things grew like triffids in my Hawkes Bay garden several years ago, I clobbered them right back to little stumps just showing for the winter!! They were snowed on and frosted but they popped up again in the spring and flowered all through summer. They are better for frequent haircuts to stop seeding which prolong the flowering, don't be afraid to chop them as they are bomb proof. Good luck, Sandra

Floral, you are right to warn gardeners about using any forms of purple loosestrife here (horticultural as well as wild) in gardens. Perennials.all, I do have a good idea of the distribution of wild purple loosestrife in Ontario and elsewhere in North America. I think you missed the point of my post. The 1992 Manitoba Study took plants of the horticultural cultivar 'Morden Pink' and planted them near a river and adjacent to wetlands, both of which had wild purple loosestrife present. The furthest any of the cultivar plants were away from wild purple loosestrife was 200 meters. 'Morden Pink' was thought to be sterile. It was presumed that the ability of plants of the cultivar to self-fertilize themselves, in the way the wild type does, had been bred out of them; namely that they were "self-incompatable". In fact, it was found that the cultivar plants lost their self-incompatability (hence sterility) in these locations in the presence of the wild type and, like the wild form, produced very large numbers of seeds. Some gardeners then wondered whether there was any evidence for sterile purple loosestrife cultivars losing their self-incompatatbility in garden situations, when the gardens were located nowhere near wetlands nor wild-growing purple loosestrife. Some simply dismissed this question out of hand. Either you believed in "the purple plague" or you didn't. Personally I'm more impressed by evidence. Are the researchers correct in extrapolating from purple loosestrife cultivars placed in research locations to those in average gardens? Over the years, I've seen almost no relevant evidence presented by gardeners. My post presents such evidence; that is seedlings which have been produced by one plant of a horticultural purple loosestrife cultivar that lost it's self-incompatability in a garden.