First Editions® Sapphire Surf™ Bluebeard

The weather is cooling off in late summer and early fall. It's a perfect time to entertain family and friends. How does your landscape look at this time of year?

Be honest. Could you use a little help visually cooling down the hot, dry garden at the end of a long summer? Try First Editions® Sapphire Surf™ Bluebeard (Caryopteris x clandonensis 'Blauer Splatz') and catch a wave of beautiful, ocean blue.

If you need more late-season color to perk up your parties, just add Sapphire Surf Bluebeard from First Editions. You'll easily brighten your landscape with armloads of rich blue flowers, fragrant foliage and butterflies.

This easy care gem is a compact, low maintenance shrub. Drought tolerant, it produces deep blue flowers from top to bottom in late summer and throughout the fall—a time when not much else is going on in the garden.

You'll love the flower power of the masses of cool flowers!

The blooms are perfect landing pads for pretty butterflies to feast on the welcome nectar. They'll love dancing over the tops of these plants. But rabbits and deer seem to leave this great little plant alone.

Dark green leaves have a fantastic silvery and grayish overcast and make the perfect foil. They are a super contrast against the rich blue flowers that grow along the branch tips.

The blooms provide an astonishing range of lavender blues that age into brilliant indigo blue tones. Each flower will be slightly different and unique.

A truly beautiful plant, Sapphire Surf will thrill you in your border, in pots or in perennial beds. Low maintenance, deer-resistant and beautiful. What more could you ask for in a garden flower? You will love this plant.

Order yours from us today!

How to Use Sapphire Surf Bluebeard in the Landscape

You'll easily find a place to tuck one, two or thirty in your yard. Why not use a few in each of your landscape plantings? You'll unify the look across the property and help butterflies at the same time.

Add several plants as "Thrillers" in big, colorful containers anywhere in your landscape. They will perform beautifully on the pool deck or on either side of your entryway. Plant them and sit back and enjoy the fall show. They'll delight you as a rounded mass of fragrant, gray green foliage all summer.

Sapphire Surf Bluebeard makes a fantastic edging shrub for the front of the mixed border and is the perfect plant to include with your perennial gardens. Pair with Butterfly Bush, Sedum, Aster, Coneflower and Rudbeckia for a butterfly nectar station.

It has a refined, yet informal look and can be used in place of a Boxwood hedge in those hot sunny areas that can use some color. Let this silvery colored plant encase your rectangular bed filled with spring flowering bulbs and annuals, or your favorite perennials. They also make great facer plants for Roses.

Everyone always has those hot spots in their landscapes that nothing seems to do well there. Try this Bluebeard selection! Plant a long row along a hot dry sidewalk or as a low hedge near your patio as a replacement for Lavender.

Use these compact shrubs in a mass planting as a beautiful groundcover. Don't forget about your sunny foundation areas where you need a shorter flowering plant.

Space shrubs 1 ½ to 2 feet apart in full sun. They'll take partial shade in Zones 7 - 9.

Overall, Sapphire Surf Bluebeard is a magnificent, low maintenance shrub that produces wonderful flowers. It looks good all year. Even in winter, the branches will catch and sculpt the snow or frost. The bare branch structure is dense and beautiful and makes a pretty picture.

#ProPlantTips for Care

Sapphire Surf Bluebeard will grow in any soil, except wet soils. It will thrive in soil that drains well.

Give large containers adequate drainage. Raise the container up on a circle of bricks so the water can drain freely from the bottom. We don't recommend using a saucer underneath outdoor plants, so place your container where the drain water won't cause a problem.

Give your new plants a moderate amount of water the first season to get their roots established in your soil. Once the plants are growing well, they'll become drought tolerant. Baby them a bit in their first few seasons.

In early spring, cut your Sapphire Surf 4 - 6 from the ground just as it starts to grow. Then, watch it shoot up new growth each year. The plants bloom on new growth, so this hard pruning makes the flower display stronger every year.

This easy-care, deciduous flowering plant has few problems. Simply give this little guy a good haircut early in the spring as it starts to grow. Then, just leave it alone! You will be rewarded with a phenomenal flower display late summer into fall.

In colder hardiness zones, there may be some winter dieback on the branch tips. Bluebeard are used like a woody perennial in colder areas with perfect success year after year. This plant responds beautifully with a once a year early spring prune which will help it flower profusely.

Plant Sapphire Surf Bluebeard to liven up your late season garden and attract beautiful butterflies in droves. The lovely blue flowers that grow up and along the branch tips make an eye-catching display and absolutely cover this compact cutie. Order yours today!