Festuca glauca Intense Blue

The Festuca 'Intense Blue' is a variety of intensely blue Fescue, whose foliage shines with a metallic sheen. This small perennial and evergreen grass forms beautiful cushions with a slightly bristly habit, from which silver spikelets gracefully hang, bringing a subtly luminous touch to the plant in the second half of spring. This grass is perfect for difficult areas, lovely as ground cover, edging, in a scree garden or at the front of borders, even in dry and poor soil.

Native to central Europe and the rocky areas of the western Mediterranean, blue fescue has long been naturalized in various regions around the globe, as it is both undemanding in terms of soil, perfectly hardy and highly drought-resistant. It belongs, like many grasses, to the large family of poaceae. In the wild, it grows in dry and poor terrain, in sandy and gravelly soils, in full sun. It is the origin of some beautiful cultivars selected for their increasingly astonishing blue color, including 'Intense Blue', one of the most recent.

This non-trailing perennial forms small stiff, very dense, rounded hemispherical clumps, 30 cm (12in) in height and width. Its evergreen foliage is composed of fine, stiff leaves, slightly thicker than those of the type, with a very bluish gray color, covered with a waxy film that gives it a metallic appearance, also reflecting excellent adaptation to dry environments. Flowering occurs from the end of June. Very thin, blue-colored floral stems emerge from the center of the clump. They bear loose spikelets at their tips, with a silver color. Over time, these inflorescences take on a more yellowish hue, indicating that its seeds are ripe. These seeds are dispersed by the wind, self-seeding here and there in light soils.

The 'Intense Blue' blue fescue, comfortable anywhere, will easily find its place in a rockery, a scree garden, a slope, along a path, and can even be an alternative to turf in dry, moderately trafficked zones. Its light spikelet flowering gives the clump a gently disheveled appearance that softens its stiffness. It can, for example, be mixed with ground-covering plants such as lamb's ears (Stachys lanata or cretica), white wormwood, Montpellier soapwort, Mexican fleabane, creeping baby's breath, and many others. It also adapts very well to container gardening, allowing to lighten certain floral compositions or to fill the base of a small palm tree, a candle cactus, or an Adenium for example.