Aubrieta: A rocky ground cover beauty in your garden

One of the most popular of rock plants, aubretias are reliable plants that form wide carpets of colour in late spring and early summer. Aubretia has purple flowers that associate particularly well with pink or yellow flowers. Team with plants of similar vigour that won’t be swamped by the aubretia – yellow Alyssum saxatile, Alyssum montanum or pink arabis, for example. It looks especially superb grown along a hollow topped wall where the plants can cascade down over the edges – plant a mixture of varieties to give a multicoloured effect.

Mertensia a herbaceous perennial bloomer for your yard, pot, and garden

Cultivation

Best grown in well-drained soil in full sun, an ideal plant for dry areas such as chalky slopes and on walls, but it can tolerate partial shade. Being hardy, it is a useful container plant for spring colour.

Suggested planting locations and garden types

City and courtyard gardens
Coastal
Cottage and informal garden
Patio and container plants
Rock garden
Garden edging
Ground cover
Banks and slopes

How to Grow Aubretia

Aubreita is a low-growing, evergreen perennial which forms a mat of flowers and is good for the front of a border or better still, tumbling down a wall.

Aubretia is fully hardy and flowers best in a sunny spot, but it will grow in semishade. Aubretia prefers well-drained soil and will tolerate dry growing conditions, which is why it is so well suited to being planted in walls and rockeries. It requires just a little maintenance and is trouble free.

Although Aubrieta is not scented, it is attractive to bees and long flowering.

Aubretia flowers are in shades of light blue, mauve and pink and some varieties have variegated foliage, all are low-growing, small plants.

Diascia a beautiful flower that overshadows petunia and lobelia – ideal for groundcover, pot and flower beds

Although a very simple and common garden plant, it is a lovely sight in spring to see a well established Aubrieta trailing over a wall a mass of blue, purple and pink; Aubretia looks pretty and makes a cheerful splash of colour.

It is easy to get cuttings from Aubretia. Often they send out little plantlets around them and you can pot these up to grow on for planting out later when they have a mature root. Also Aubretia root easily trim off a cutting a few centimetres long in midsummer and root into well-drained compost. Let the plant grow on to a mature size in a suitable container, and then it is ready for planting out.

Aubretia can be raised from seed if you want to cultivate a particularly colour or variety not commonly found in the garden centres, such as A.’Cascade red’, which as the name suggests is a bright red variety, but otherwise the easiest way is to take cuttings.