Veronica Blue Sprite

Veronica ‘Blue Sprite’ is a diminutive yet durable speedwell that flowers from early or mid-June until mid-July, packing its violet flowers on dense flower stems only 6 inches tall. The plants are equally dense with fine, olive-green foliage on creeping rhizomes. Two-year old trial plants measured only 10 inches wide by 1 inch tall. Equally tough as it is attractive, ‘Blue Sprite’ is highly disease-resistant, drought-tolerant, and hardy to USDA Zone 4. Grow this selection for its attractive violet flowers in early summer, its clean olive-green foliage on well-behaved, low creeping plants, and for its red-tinted foliage in autumn and early winter. Durable and disease resistant. Mass it as a small-scale groundcover in the front of the sunny perennial border, use it by walkways and by other garden edges, and in the rock garden. Like many speedwells, this selection prefers full sun to light shade, and a well-drained soil. It has been both drought tolerant, and seasonally moisture tolerant, under trial in northern Illinois. Maintenance is minimal, that being removal of the spent flower stems in autumn. The foliage has died back in severe winters with inadequate snow cover, but recovers in the spring. Avoid covering the stems with mulch, but mulch around plants on sandy soils to preserve some soil moisture. Avoid crowding by taller perennials that may shade it out.

Developed by Dr. Jim Ault at the Chicago Botanic Garden from open-pollinated seed collected in 2007 from an unnamed selection of Veronica allionii. The pollen parent was unknown, but presumably was one of the adjacent speedwell cultivars under evaluation. The seed was germinated in 2008, seedlings were planted out that year, and the selection was made in 2009. The original plant was propagated in 2010, and then trial plants were evaluated in-ground for five years at the Chicago Botanic Garden (USDA Zone 5).

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