Wild Blue Indigo

Baptisia australis

Wild Blue Indigo is one of the great native perennials. structural, long-lived, deeply rooted, and spectacular in bloom. The blue-green, shrub-like mound of compound leaves is handsome all season, then in late spring sends up spikes of deep blue-violet lupine-like flowers that stop people in their tracks. The flowers are a rich, saturated indigo that is almost impossible to find elsewhere in the native plant palette. After flowering, inflated charcoal-black seed pods rattle and bob in the wind through fall and winter, providing both wildlife value and visual interest. Like all baptisias, it fixes nitrogen, improves the soil, and is a host plant for multiple butterfly species including the Wild Indigo Duskywing and Orange Sulphur. Give it room. a mature clump can reach 4 feet across. and then leave it alone. It will reward you for decades.