Friday, May 27, 2011

Blue False Indigo

This is Blue False Indigo, Baptisia australis, and after... 3 or 4 years in the garden it's Finally started flowering! I bought this as a 3 gallon pot from some nursery around here and it's taken this long just to start blooming. Normally when you buy a plant it's flowering in the pot so that's outrageous.

It's in a fairly ideal position in the garden. It gets full sun, I water it whenever it droops, it doesn't have any real pest issues. It's the host plant to a few moths and butterflies but nothing that completely defoliates the plant. An odd thing I've noticed is at the tips of each stem there is a shrived end, as if each stem could have grown taller but the plant said No Stop Here. I've seen it in past years and assumed those were flowers that failed to form. Now that's flowering well I still see them at the ends of some stems but clearly most of the buds formed. 

I was always annoyed by the common name, False Indigo, but now that I see it in person I kind of agree with it. Even between my two pictures here you can see a real color difference despite my using the same camera, without a flash. The only difference was the time of day each photo was taken.