Friday, September 17, 2010

Flower Friday - Hebe


'Blue Mist' Hebe

This week's featured flowers are 'Blue Mist' Hebe!  This perennial shrub blooms all summer long and stays green year round.  We have a few different varieties of Hebe, and they are all evergreen perennials but are very different in size and color.  'Blue Mist' is right in between our larger and smaller varieties and has flowers that are a light periwinkle purple and seem to glow at dusk and dawn.   Bees and butterflies love these flowers.  This shrub gets to be around two feet tall and two feet wide and it puts on a striking display of flowers each summer, with thousands of tiny flowers blooming along six inch racemes.  The perfectly symmetrical leaves are almost as lovely as the flowers, and the flowers burst out in all directions giving this plant a shape that reminds me of a mound of fireworks.  Hebe is in the Veronica family of plants, so the flowers are very similar to Speedwell while the overall shape of the shrub is quite different.  To learn more about about 'Blue Mist' Hebe, check out Kwantlen Polytechnic University's 'Blue Mist' Hebe page, OSU Extension Service's Hebe article, or the Hebe page at Dave's Garden.



A few book and blogosphere updates:

1.  Can't wait to pick up Brenna Yovanoff's The Replacement next Tuesday?  You can read the first chapter here via Amazon's 'More to Explore' feature.  Brenna also shared the book playlist on her blog this week.
2.  Looking for something fun to read over the weekend?  You can read the entire first book in Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series or preview some upcoming books like Diana Peterfreund's Ascendant, Anna Godbersen's Bright Young Things, Francesca Lia Block's The Frenzy, or Emily Whitman's Wildwing using HarperTeen's Browse Inside feature.  
3.  Madeleine at Wordbird is hosting a 'Megalodon of a Giveaway' to celebrate her one year blogoversary.  She is giving away an Amazon giftcard and eleven awesome books (pictured to the right --->).  Stop by Wordbird to find out how you can enter before October 4th.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm looking forward to The Replacement.

I've never seen Blue Mist Hebes before. They're lovely.

Liz @ Cleverly Inked said...

Just sitting on the replacement have not gotten a chance to read it yet

Sheila (Bookjourney) said...

Love the flowers! We are already in a cool fall rainy period here in Minnesota so flowers are welcome :)

Violet said...

Medeia Sharif - The Replacement sounds eerily creepy. I look forward to reading it too. :)

Liz - We definitely need to petition for more hours in the day. Specifically, more quiet hours to devote to reading.

Sheila - We probably have one more month of semi-pleasant weather before the cold rain sets in here too, but I'll try to keep sharing spring & summertime garden pics throughout the dreary autumn. :)

Yumi's Blog said...

Interesting flower! this is the first time I saw a flower like this. Anyway, its so attractive and I like it. Thanks for sharing this post. Looking forward for your next post.

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ford said...

Pretty flowers! Seems your garden was so healthy. Wish I can have a healthy garden too. I'm been looking for interesting topic as this. Looking forward for your next post. Keep posting!

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