By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

As happens so often among gardeners, somebody gave me a wonderful blue-flowered ground cover once, with two results: I loved the plant and lost the name. For about a year I thought it was Ceratostigma plumbaginoides, which gets Sharon’s well-deserved praise in yesterday’s post. My plant grows the same height, spreads in the same way, has blue flowers and wiry stems, and its leaves turn bronzy in autumn.

But a few things were seriously wrong with my i.d. For starters, my plant has four petals per flower, not five; its leaves are much smaller than dwarf plumbago’s; and its bloom season is in spring, not late summer. There’s good reason for all these differences: I have Veronica umbrosa ‘Georgia Blue’, not dwarf plumbago. (The “Georgia” part of the name is for the Asian Republic of Georgia, not the American state.)

I recommend it for anybody who wants cobalt blue in their spring garden, and who doesn’t have the long growing season that is optimal for dwarf plumbago. Both plants grow from milder mountain climates clear to the sea, excepting desert (but dwarf plumbago can handle high desert gardens).