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| Blue Curls, Phacelia congesta |
Spring brings a festival of color to our landscape in the form of wildflowers, mostly in shades of red, yellow, orange, purple, pink, and white. But the most infrequent color of them all is blue. There is no true blue pigment in plants, so they don’t have a direct way to produce blue color. Plants have to perform a sort of trickery to produce blue blooms, using a common plant pigment called anthocyanin. Plants have evolved to tweak their normally red to purple anthocyanin pigments by naturally modifying pH and then mixing those pigments, and combined with the way natural light reflects, these factors result in the creation of blue flowers.
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| Dayflower, Commelina erecta |
Aside from the well-known bluebonnet, there are other blue beauties in bloom this time of year, including Dayflower (Commelina erecta), Blue Curls (Phacelia congesta), and Texas Bluestar (Amsonia ciliata). Dayflower is a 3-foot high perennial with soft jointed stems that grow upright only if supported by other plants. It blooms from May to October, but most frequently in spring or fall. The flowers are about 1 inch across, with two larger showy blue petals and one much smaller white petal. Lasting only a day, several of these ephemeral blooms occur on one plant, generally one at a time, each opening 3 to 4 days apart. Often found growing in dry scrub and partly shaded woods, its other common names include Widow’s Tears and White-mouth Dayflower.
Blue Curls, also known as Caterpillars, Fiddleneck, or Spike Phacelia, is a leafy annual or biennial that grows 1 to 3 feet tall in sandy or rocky soil. Its periwinkle blue, bell-shaped flowers are ¼ inch long and occur in numerous slender, coiled clusters that uncurl as the buds develop, resembling the suckered underside of an octopus tentacle. Its leaves are soft and deeply cut, often appearing ragged, borne on a brittle stem. Blooming from March to May, Blue Curls is often found in large colonies in meadows and woodland edges.
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| Texas Bluestar, Amsonia ciliata |
Growing up to 2 feet tall, Texas Bluestar blooms from March to June in dry open woods and on chalky hills. Its narrow almost needle-like leaves occur singly but close together all long the stem up to the flower cluster. Every cluster is made up of few to numerous pale blue flowers, each ½ inch long and wide, with a narrow tube opening into 5 petal-like lobes shaped like a star, with a ring of white at the center. It is also known as Fringed Bluestar, referring to the fringe of small hairs found on the new leaves and plant stems.
Less than 10 percent of the more than 280,000 species of flowering plants on Earth produce blue flowers. Interestingly, while blue did not develop as a common color during the process of natural selection, plants that have blue blooms don’t seem to deter beneficial pollinators. Both birds and insects can widely detect blue wavelengths, and blue flowers are just as capable of producing food as flowers of other colors.
