My Favorite Blue Flowers

In surveys, blue is the world’s most popular color. And for many gardeners, blue is also their favorite flower color. This past spring, our perennial expert, Bonnie Hickey, gave a talk on blue flowers. These are a few things she mentioned:

Blue flowers blend nicely with many other colors and can create a calming effect or an exciting effect depending on the companion colors you choose. The softer shades of blue combine well with soft yellow, pink, white and apricot and also with plants with silver foliage. Deeper blues provide high impact combined with golden yellow, orange, or red flowers or chartreuse foliage. To keep an all-blue border from getting monotonous, add a pop of white or another color here and there.

Using plants with blue foliage is another way to add blue to your garden. Some hostas, dianthus, and some of the ornamental grasses have almost true-blue foliage.

Here is a chart of the characteristics of my favorite blue flowers. Choose the ones that will work for you. You can’t go wrong with flower combinations using blue.