Plant identification help please

[billybagpuss]

Does anyone know what this is?

It came in a winter colour selection I bought to go in pots just before Christmas but Is now looking rather pretty (I can forgive it not matching my colour scheme)

I think its bugle. It likes to creep and puts up those little blue flower spikes.

Thank you, yes I think you’re right, I’ve not heard of it before it’s pretty.

The flowers look like Ajuga (bugleweed) but the leaves on mine don’t match the picture.
Those leaves look a bit narrow to me for Ajuga

My plant app also says Bugle

I think it's bugle (ajuga reptans) - there are several varieties and it would a bit different if it had more room to creep across the soil.

I’m really not convinced at all.

The Ajuga I have has deep burgundy leaves that are more rounded/broad than the photo.
I’m fairly sure they are serrated too on mine.

Just been looking at more photographs of Ajuga on google and the leaves really don’t look right to me, they are too narrow and smooth

Ooh @DiddlyWiddly I bought another pick n mix pack yesterday to replace the primroses I’d taken out of the planter and one of them the leaves look the same as that picture a bit more nettle like.

Also the original pack had some similar shape but darker more burgundy colour leaves and I’ve put those in the main garden now so it will be interesting to see if they have similar flowers.

I also thought bugle but after diddlywiddly’s post I wonder about a kind of salvia?

Possibly a Stachys - most likely a cultivar of Stachys officinalis

My first thought was Salvia too

Difficult to see the leaves, but maybe this:
www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/salvia-nachtvlinder/classid.2000022955/

I think Bugle but it's the wild variety that you get in woodlands etc.

I think it’s a type of Bugle, think Salvia generally flower later and with how cold it’s been can’t see one flowering now . Agree with the poster who said it would look different if had more space to creep across the soil.

The only thing in flower in my garden is bugle and it has just come out. It's still too cold for anything else (oh, there are one or two violas and the wallflowers planted last autumn) so I would guess it is a type of bugle.

Definitely bugle, the original wild version (Ajuga reptans) and not one of the garden varieties.

Very popular with pollinators but will spread readily through overground runners, so needs keeping an eye on if you leave it.

I would like to see a close up of the flower before firmly identifying this as Bugle. The key difference between Bugle (Ajuga) and Salvia or Stachys is the flower shape. Salvia has both upper and lower lips well developed, the same applies to Stachys . Ajuga has a well developed lower lip and poorly developed upper lip, as in Diddly's photo, where you have an obvious 4-lobed lower lip and virtually nothing for the upper lip.

I'd strongly dispute Diddly's comment that the leaves are wrong because they're too smooth. Ajuga reptans is easy to recognise in the wild because of its shiny leaves with more or less smooth edges. it grows in dampish places and is quite tolerant of shade. There's various varieties with darker leaves which is widely sold.

There are other species of Ajuga, for example Ajuga pyramidalis, A. genevensis. So I would presume Diddly's, which from flower shape does seem to be and Ajuga, but whose leaves are wrong for Ajuga reptans, is either a different species of Ajuga or a hybrid. see here for a garden form of Ajuga reptans clearly showing shiny leaves with non-serrated edges.

I accept Diddly's comment that the leaves look too narrow, and that's one reason I'd like to see a close-up of the flower before coming down on the "Bugle" side. Flower shape is very important in the higher level classification of plants (family and genus) - flowers are the means of sexual reproduction, and therefore the means by which genes are inherited and new species evolve, so any classification which seeks to replicate the evolutionary tree places great emphasis on flower shape ... except, of course, now we have the ability to actually look at the genetic material we don't have to rely on physical characteristics so much. It's because we're looking into the DNA and discovering relationships and differences that are difficult to distinguish purely from physical characters that we're having to revise some of our plant names so that the scientific names continue to reflect the evolutionary tree as we now understand it to be.