Plant of the Week: Beyond Midnight® Caryopteris

Hello and Happy Monday!

Spring Meadow Nursery admin building and conference center

This week is a busy one at Spring Meadow Nursery. We are getting ready to have our first guests at the brand new conference center! These are a group of some of our most active customers, and we'll be making presentations and giving tours all day Tuesday, into Wednesday.

So to save a little time, but still get my weekly post out, I'm going to repost Jane's Plant of the Week, which happens to be a variety I wrote about last week in my pollinator post, Caryopteris! I wrote about Sunshine Blue® II and Lil' Miss Sunshine®, and this post is about Beyond Midnight®, but they are all spectacular. 

Enjoy! - Natalie

Light Beyond Midnight

Caryopteris is a very rewarding plant in many ways. It's easy to grow and once established in a landscape is pretty trouble free. Bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds love it, and deer don't. Plus, it has that most unusual of horticultural colors, blue.

Beyond Midnight® is an outstanding selection with very dark, glossy foliage and a compact habit. Older varieties could look kind of ratty after a while, but this plant stays nice and full. The flowers are spectacular, too. They are a rich blue that cools down the steamy late summer garden.

Like all Caryopteris, Beyond Midnight® requires full sun and well-drained soil. It will grow to about 30" tall and wide and is hardy to USDA Zone 5. 

Plant of the Week is written by Jane Beggs-Joles. 

Note from Natalie: Though Caryopteris, a.k.a. bluebeard, is technically a shrub, it will experience dieback and can be treated as a perennial in colder zones...but don't cut it back in the fall. If you wait to cut back this plant when you see new growth in early spring you'll get a more vigorous plant with more late-summer flowers.