My blue mist plant is blooming - I'm just so tickled

I had gotten three of these plants about three or four years ago from a company back east, which was the only place I could find them. I'd had one once before, more than 20 years ago that I got off eBay and I remembered how pretty it was when it bloomed.

Well, I planted these three in good soil, but where they only got about 4 hours of sun a day and none in winter. This spring, I dug them up and put them in the garden bed. Two of them I thought were dead, but they surprised me by leafing out this year. They didn't get very far because the marigolds I planted went mutant and grew big enough to shade them again. I took care of that problem this morning and transplanted an 18" marigold to the back of the flower bed. Who knew they got this tall?

Anyhoo, the third blue mist started to bloom a couple weeks ago and I think it's gorgeous.

 

Gorgeous !! I love those plants !!

 

The blue flowered plant looks like Caryopteris / Bluebeard. They are a herbaceous shrub in my zone 8b. What growing zone is your garden in?

 

I believe my zone is 8b.

I just have to add this: I was out this morning and looked at the other tinier blue mist plants I have and one of them had a tiny branch with tiny leaves and a tiny tiny blossom as well.

 

A picture is worth a thousand words… Plz..
Perhaps add the garden area your in too…plz… Will help members here to help you with your questions.
Your bluemist flower plant could also be Conoclinium coelestinum/ageratum.

 

The blue mist plant is the plant in the two pictures in the beginning of this thread. The little one is so tiny, I'm not sure I could get a decent pic of it (I was nose to leaf with the plant to even see it and that was with taking my reading glasses off. LOL). I'd have to lean in pretty close with the camera and that would make it blurry. But I will go out in a day or two and get a pic of the mutant marigold plant, which is now looking to be almost 18" high.

By garden area, do you mean a picture of my garden beds? Here in this thread or in another place on the forum? I'm not sure if that would help anyone, because my flower bed changes wildly from spring to fall and is even more psychotic from one year to the next. I'm always yanking things out of pots and transplanting what's in the beds somewhere else. Then I wonder why nothing grows.

For instance, I have some daisies that had leaves about 3 ft high and the stalks and flowers almost reached the top of my 6ft fence. So I decided that since I have that ugly septic pump that contractors just love to put into the middle of yards, I'm going to dig up at least 4 of my daisies and put those and the butterfly bush around the septic pump next spring so I don't have to look at it.

OK, so anyway, I found the catalog where I got the blue mist plant. I bought it from Bluestone Perennials and they're based in Madison, Ohio. The official name I got from their catalog for the blue mist is Caryopteris Longwood Blue.

 

Yes pics posted here would be just fine. I am interested in a visual to help answer your questions. What state and we are in the same zone 8b and my garden is in Oregon.

Oh wow never heard of a septic pump left in the middle of the yard. And maybe ask them to move it. If not if plants planted near by would interfere with the pump? I am also on a well and septic system.. I have a pump for the water from the well to the house but the plumbing in the home sends household debris to the septic tank. Sorry I’m a bit confused about a septic tank pump in the middle of your yard. Is this a new pump? Or is this a pump for water to your house?

 

I'm not sure what it is. It's like box on a post for the electric company, only this one is a small plastic box with a door and inside is the switch to turn the septic on or off with dials and stuff. It's on a wooden post about 2 feet high. It's not exactly in the middle of the yard, more off to one side. I just have my trailer at one end of my yard so I have a whole yard that's about 3/4 of an acre so I have this sweeping view and then there's this ugly box. So if I plant around it, I won't have to look at it.

I'm in western Washington about 12 miles west of Belfair. I'm up on a 500ft hill, so things don't bloom as early as they do at sea level and we get snow up here often. I hate snow. LOL

 

So here are some pics:

So I call this my rock garden - the left side of the arbor. This is before the 6ft fence went in. This pic is from 2024 after I just weeded. Those plants are all my daisy plants - Shasta daisies and some yellow ones.


This is how much my daisy plants grew in a year. This is after I put up the 6ft fence and the daisies sent up stalks and hundreds of yellow and white blooms almost to the top of it. I tremble to think of next year. Yes, I needed to weed and eventually, I did.



This is the rock garden on the right side of the arbor in 2024. The canopy goes to the edge and everyone still gets sun. The Pepsi bottle on the ground is a wasp trap as I have a hummingbird feeder right overhead and the wasps were chasing the hummingbirds away. This is obviously just after I weeded as well.


The right side of the arbor from the front taken today. Snapdragons and marigolds.


The right side from the back taken today. There is the blue mist surrounded by marigolds with the red clover in back and the yellow daisies to the right of those. The rest of this side is just as crowded with butterfly weed in purple (1 plant) and white (2 plants), more daisies, some chives which are going to be moved next year, and a little strawberry plant right in front.

 

Some of the edibles:

Laramie strawberries. This is their first year so not many strawberries yet. But see that red one on the right? I saw it yesterday and decided to let it ripen for one more day. Today I went out and picked it and the birds had already eaten half of it.



This was taken a while back so the plants are much larger now. This is wintergreen and you use the leaves for wintergreen flavoring. The berries are supposed to be edible but again, first year for this plant so I didn't see any berries. Unless they develop later on.


My sad, sad corn. I planted 12 seeds and should have gotten two ears per stalk. Well, five stalks refused to grow, so I pulled them. Three other stalks are only going to have one ear each, and of the two that actually had two ears, raccoons pulled that stalk in half and took off with one of the ears. One of the stalks still has no silks on it and I may pull that plant. As for the rest, this is the worst summer I've seen in 25 years up here and I doubt I'll have any ears reach maturity. It's already only in the 60s now and will only get colder.



Same with the cherry tomatoes. We just didn't get any heat this summer to make them grow. I still have a lot of green ones, but I have the feeling they're going to have to ripen off the plant this year.



My grapevine. That's the plant in the white pot between the rose and the wintergreen. Obviously before I weeded. LOL The deer got in and ate every leaf, but fortunately, it leafed up again.


The giant sunflower. Another plant that will suffer from no heat this year. Everything that should have been planted in May got planted in June and it was still cold and rainy even then. This sunflower still has to set and grow seeds and again, with October a week away, that probably won't happen. I hate PNW weather. I'd give anything to be able to afford to live in California again.

 

Some of the plants:

Snapdragons grew like they were on steroids this year. Some of them are blooming for the fourth time this year. This is a third time bloom on this pink plant and it's just one plant.



Last year the deer ate my rose down three times and it never bloomed again. This year they ate it down twice before I got the fence up and it's doing beautifully now. This is the second bloom on it. Look at all those rosebuds. There's four other branches with multiple rosebuds on them.



You know those seed carpets? Roll them out and water and have millions of flowers? Well, I had a couple of those and that's where all my daisies came from. But I also got lupines. The lupines by one daisy plant were purple but this one is pink and a little different. It's the only bloom on this lupine plant and I'm hoping there's more next year.


This is the orange butterfly weed or milkweed, I guess it's called. It's gorgeous when the whole plant is in bloom.



The mutant marigold. It might be hard to tell, but that marigold in front of the black planter is at least twice the height of any of the other marigolds. It's a little droopy here, too, because I had to transplant it to behind the little blue mist plant which is barely visible in that open area. The blue mist is supposed to be a shrub. Whoever heard of a marigold being taller than a shrub?



Our local grocery store had these trees on sale for $10 each. I figured I could buy food or buy the trees, so I bought the trees and ate beans and rice for a week. LOL They're lemon cypress trees and deer don't like them. So I thought next spring I'd plant them along my driveway by my shed. They're all zip tied to the fence because the wind will blow them over otherwise.

 

This is my yard. You're actually looking at a corner of it. My contractor who messed up the yard didn't even put dirt down in the front until I nagged him and then he didn't seed it. This is the area I want to start fencing next year.



The driveway into my place. I have a shared driveway with the neighbors next door and this is my side of it. There are probably 40 bags of soil and 30 bags of bark down there to keep the weeds down, which didn't work at all this year. I'm trying to find something to plant here. This area gets maybe 3 hours of intense sun in the summer and none at all in the winter. This was where my blue mist plants were before I transplanted them.



This area is in between the driveways where they split. My driveway runs in front of this area and the neighbor's driveway is behind the cedar trees here. Technically, this is their property, but they put dirt down and grew grass on their side and I asked if I could plant my irises here. This picture was taken last year and the irises have about doubled in number and height. Five of them bloomed this year. But now, the deer are chewing them down again.

 

Thank you for the picture tour of your garden. You have been buzy. I see a lot of work . It’s lovely and it’s amazing how beautiful and colorful flowers spruce the landscape. Even though there are lots of cedar trees. Many brush plants eventually take over. So many projects and a lot of creative ideas.

It seems your location is in a country setting. I get it , my garden is 800’ above see level . So I do understand how much shorter our growing seasons are compared to sea level folks.

Luv all the flowers and plants . You have done a good job filling in the rock garden with marigolds, snaps and roses. It seems we have that deer issue in common. Deer think any garden they see with a lot of juicy morsels is their own salad bar. Have caught and fought them for years. Always chasing them off.

Back to the bluemist shrub … was it a wild plant ? Or was it from a store? It will eventualy grow bigger. They were very small starts and as the ole saying goes,”First year they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap”.
After a few years you’ll be editing out plants just to keep the peace, or they will take over quickly.


Deer snacking on my roses.

 

The blue mist came from Bluestone perennials in Ohio. I also have two butterfly bushes. One I bought from a garden shop here in Washington and the other is a wild one. It must have grown this year because I don't remember seeing it last year. In that case, it grew 5ft in one season. But it's blooming and I love it.

Yeah, I'm out in the boonies a bit. It's sort of funny how this all came about and makes a good story. Not sure how interesting it is, though.

But you should have seen me when I first moved up here. "Oh, look, a deer in my yard! How romantic!" Two months later trying to grow strawberries and tomatoes: "Oh, look, a deer in my yard. Where's my gun?" The neighbors up here feed them. So you don't chase the deer off up here. If you throw stones at them, they chase the stones, thinking they're apples. I walk out and they all start coming towards me. I'm like, "Do I know you?" I feel like a leader summoning his minions sometimes ("You are probably wondering why I have gathered you all together today...").

But anyway, when I lived in a rental in south San Jose, I knew some gardeners and they were always giving me their throwaways. I had a beautiful garden down there until I was just priced out of the area. I'm just trying to recreate that. Homesick, I guess.

 

Your story is interesting. I would imagine you miss your other home and garden. Starting over is not always easy.
As you have noticed with deer. I have so many deer and I have so many ways to scare them off. Lots of practice over the years
Good luck with your new garden.