Butterfly bushes usually bloom in Summer, at the tips of the new stems they started that Spring. So last year's growth isn't useful at all: After growth starts in the Spring, cut each limb back to the lowest possible pair of new leaves. If you're not horrified over how drastically you've pruned, keep going.
There's a butterfly bush that blooms in Spring too, and so whatever you do for your Summer-blooming butterflies, do the reverse for this one.
It blooms on last year's wood, so don't do any pruning until the bloom is well underway, or even finished. And while Summer butterflies often get huge amounts of Winter die-back, Spring butterflies are so hardy that their wood lives year after year, and they can get bigger and bigger: As big as a lilac, and usually much wider.
But since my philosophy is "Why let anything grow naturally if I could be torturing it instead?", I'm getting out the pruners to take full advantage of my Spring butterfly's oddball talents.
The wood is hardy year-to-year? Fine: Then I'll pick one main branch, stake it up, cut off the lower limbs, and—voila—I've got a small tree, a "standard" as we say.  A "standard" as anything that's trained into a ball-on-a-stick form that wouldn't otherwise grow that way.
The younger branches tend to weep, especially as they bloom? Great! I'll get the trunk high enough so that I can have a (small) weeping tree.
And the bush comes in a form with conspicuously silver leaves, not just the regular fuzzy green ones? That's the one for me.
Here's the progress, then, on my silver-leaved, weeping, standard of Spring-blooming butterfly bush.
I've staked up a center branch to grow as a trunk, but then, in the way of much in any garden, got involved with a million other things for a couple of years. Time to prune and primp and reveal what's what.
How 'bout those lavender blooms in three-foot-long spikes? Every garden needs more fireworks.
With the stray lower branches pruned off, the young standard's trunk and head-growth are showing nicely.
And as the plant ages, the number of branches in the canopy increases nicely, making a fuller, wider, and lower-weeping canopy. That's a deep-purple ninebark bush at the left-front, cut to the ground each Spring. It will get six feet tall by September, which is just how tall I should get the butterfly's trunk so the weeping silver branches will mix nicely with the purple of the ninebark.
That's a blue-leaved rose at the back, which will get big enough to form a darker background to the whole ensemble.
Give me three more years, and this will be stunning.
PS: OK, time to grow up and switch over to the Latin:
Silver-leaved Spring-blooming butterfly bush: Buddleia alternifolia 'Argentea'
Purple-leaved ninebark: Physocarpus opulifolius 'Seward'
Blue-leaved rose: Rosa glauca

I never met a spice bush I didn't like. Easy to see why: The leaves reek of cinnamon and clove when crushed, so of course deer leave this shrub alone. And the flowers have a unique-in-hardy-plants fruity-banana fragrance. The American versions, and there are several, have small but profuse flowers for some weeks in Spring and into Summer; the unusually-long blooming season is reason enough to grow it right there. And they are all impressively, even scarily, shade-tolerant. More shade-tolerant even than yews, oh yes. And so I even plant spice bushes in Manhattan, in gardens surrounded by skyscrapers and shaded directly overhead by huge trees. So far so good, but then there's a Chinese cousin too. It was crossed with the American to create the pink-flowered beauty you see here, 'Hartlage Wine'. And this one is in one of my Manhattan client gardens, with scarcely any sun. And look how happy it is.
What you can't see is that it's already eight feet tall and only four years old. What a performer!
Yes yes, the flowers are pink. Unashamedly, excitedly, exuberantly. Fine: that's why I have two enormous Pink Borders. Hartlage Wine: come home to papa.

Evergreen deer-proof groundcovers are scarce. (Think about it: deer will demolish pachysandra and ivy. Only vinca has potential to cover a reasonable amount of space effectively.)
So "Sweet Box" is important. It's congenial too, spreading slowing (yes, often too slowly) but steadily. (If you have ever had opportunity to dig up some, you'll be shocked, shocked, at the profusion of horizontal white stolons you'll expose. You'd think the plant would be spreading with the speed and ruthlessness of bamboo. We wish.)
Instead it's more like the Little Engine That Could. You plant pots of it, oh, two feet apart, closer if you can afford it, and they merge with the speed of a tai-chi group. If you worry about how they're doing, they don't seem to get anywhere. But then (well, a few years later), you've got a colony like this one at one of my client's:

If you spend a lot of time on your knees near your colony, or are just a munchkin, you'll pick up a Fall talent: pleasantly fragrant flowers. Hence the "sweet" box thing. (Of course, the plant doesn't look a thing like box, which has much smaller as well as rounded leaves, and doesn't spread underground either.)
The flowerbuds are in the crotches of the leaves. The display is all nasal, so to speak, not visual. You won't see that the bush is blooming, but (if you're at that low altitude at least), you'll sure smell it.
Oh yes: What a fun latin name: Sarcococca. It even sounds like the Little Engine That Could: SARcococca, SARcococca, SARcococca, SARcococca. The second name, "humilis", echoes "humility". The bush is unassuming and hardworking, with a low profile. Humility indeed.
Of course there's a catch: sarcococca isn't as hardy as we'd all like. Zone 6 only, and even so, you're doomed if it doesn't have great Winter drainage. I've proved this in my own gardens. I'll try again with sarcococca, but in my modestly-but-effectively-raised terrace beds. Even an couple of inches of raised-bed-ness can do the trick: Any little elevation will ensure that the water slides off the bed instead of sitting around helping everything rot.
Here in New England, sarcococca is Spring-plant only, so I'd better get cracking. Got it.

It's a long time in "Spring" before the mainstream "Spring" stuff like rhodies and azaleas get going. It's actually hot out. For Spring when it's chilly and still making up its mind—which is, I'd think, when we all need Spring the most—look farther.
No, farther even than forsythia. Your neighbor has that already anyway.
Corylopsis bloom even earlier than forsythia, with more nuanced flowers followed (as I'll post later), unlike forsythia, by dynamite foliage. (I'll post when this bush's foliage comes out.) And the branching is better than forsythia too: Strong horizontals as well as strong verticals. Corylopsis can be big—ten even fifteen feet wide as well as tall—but unlike forsythia they never come across as just a dump of twigs waiting for the compost heap.But first the flowers:
Here's a mature Corylopsis pauciflora from a client's garden. Click to enlarge it—the details are so satisfying. (There are several other species. It's not important to get worked up about which particular one; pauciflora is hardy and, for a corylopsis, not overly big. So it's a great one to start with. In this regard, then, it's the counterpart of Hamamelis "Arnold Promise": foolproof and glad-to-see you. If you only have one hamamelis, Arnold Promise is a great one to have. Only one corylopsis? Do pauciflora.)
The flowers are in pendant chains, a soft yellow-green instead of the sunglass-inducing chrome yellow of forsythia. They are fragrant too, although it's not a penetrating, traveling, "watch it roll toward you" fragrance like with Daphne mezereum, true. But continuing my theme (I see) of honoring plants that are stylish stalwarts when any garden needs them the most, I say that you should just get out there in the chill and drizzle and bring your nose to your corylopsis. It's working hard (but with joy), so give back a little effort in return.
But why not corylopsis from my own garden? Well, one or two are on the plans—but for areas that are only this year getting transformed from Before (i.e., ignored mess) to After (gardens). And even the small corylopsis ain't small enough. Until, that is, I discovered Corylopsis gotoana 'March Jewel', which gets only eighteen inches high (and yes, five feet across, so it's only dwarf in one dimension). I hope to snag one of those this Fall, unless you beat me to it at Camellia Forest nursery.