Blue ground cover flowers - a lovely garden success!

This is one of my favorite late spring flowers. I love the combination of dark reddish leaves and bright blue flower spikes. (Blue Bugle or Ajuga reptans ‘Braunherz’ - thank you +Doodle Maier )
Bees love it.

It’s a ground covering plant and to grow it successfully, it needs some of the day in the shade. These are growing around a hollyhock and the big leaves give the shade they need to thrive.

It's growing very happily in a few places in my garden. Now it is well established and spreading I can use the largest patch as mother plant, taking out rooted plugs  to move to other areas.

I find it best to do this when it is flowering. The flowers grow above a well rooted, independent plant. This makes it simple to work out where to cut the plant out using my bulb planter. I place it above a flower, push it in with my foot and hay presto! It cuts the whole plant straight out of the ground without disturbing the roots. The planter also slices through any runners and giving me an easy to handle plug, easy to pop into its new home. 

I'll plant these slightly deeper than they were growing, this encourages the plant to root sideways really
quickly. I do this by breaking off about an inch of soil at the bottom of the plug so it drops  further down into the new hole.

I planted some around the pond earlier in the year and these are doing very well. Some are already flowering and sending out runners. They will grow in the gaps between the bricks around the pond soften the hard edges of the bricks by the end of this summer. I really like the contrast of dark leaves against the orange bricks.

I'm transplanting these new plants to the back of my pond underneath the stick hedge. It’s a difficult area for me to reach and weed, so I'm hoping they like it there and that over time, they will form a dense mat and suppress the weeds.