Sea Holly 'Blue Glitter'

The rounded, hairy steel-blue blooms are just about ½-inch wide and tall, with a collar of long, slender, pointed petals beneath them. They appear on dramatic violet to black stems, 8 to 12 inches long, above powdery blue foliage. In other words, this perennial is unusually colored from the ground up, and all the better for it!

'Blue Glitter' flowers from midsummer through early fall, its best show in full blazing sun and well-drained garden soil. It will tolerate some shade, but its blue tones will not be as intense. And you want all you will get from this tall, well-branched, strikingly lovely plant!

Expect 'Blue Glitter' to reach about 2 to 3 feet tall and 1 to 1½ feet wide, growing very quickly. It sets not only a terminal bloom at the tip of each flowering stem, but several side-buds along the way, so when you cut the entire stem, you have a small bouquet of blooms! No wonder it won Europe's top award when it was first introduced, in seed form. After taking the Fleuroselect for 2007, it made its way across the ocean, and is now available in plant form at last!

Sea Holly is a great coastal planting, as its name implies. It doesn't mild salt spray or sandy soils, but it also flourishes in ordinary garden soils. It grows by taproot, which makes it difficult to transplant and almost impossible to grow in a container. Give it deep soil and let it make itself at home permanently; you will love the results! Zones 5-9.