Even a small planting of Baby Blue Eyes is attention-getting in the partly shaded garden, and a mass planting is showstopping! This spreading groundcover offers gray-green leaves topped by wide-open, cup-shaped bells of softest azure blue surrounding a pure white throat. Reaching 1½ inches wide, they blanket the ground as if reflecting the summer sky!

Baby Blue Eyes is just one name for this tender perennial (which is grown everywhere as an annual). It's also known as California Bluebell, reflecting its status as a native California plant that has colonized slopes, meadows, and cliffsides. You need only start it from seed once, for it will happily re-sow every year!

Just 6 inches high in full bloom, this plant reaches about a foot wide. It offers a dense carpet of color in any partly shaded spot. If you must grow it in more sun, try to keep the soil evenly moist; the more water available to Baby Blue Eyes, the more sunlight it can tolerate!

The flowers begin in late spring or early summer and last for many weeks, transforming the plant into a showpiece of soft pastel powder-blue. Borne by the many dozen, they hide the foliage at the height of their season!

Baby Blue Bells is native to woodlands as well as meadows and open sites, and it likes decently fertile, well-drained soils. It thrives in containers, spilling over the sides and trailing its blooms every inch of the way. In the annual bed, it meanders around other plants, never choking them out but filling space nicely. And in zone 7 and farther south or west, it overwinters and returns for another season of beauty! You can't go wrong with this native treasure.