Lobelia - article by Whimsical Wire Articles

Wild Flowers in the Lobelia Family (Lobeliaceae)

Cardinal Flower; Red Lobelia (Lobelia cardinalis). This wild flower produces rich vermilion flowers, though at rare times you'll find rose or white colored flowers on it too. The blooms are one to one and a half inches long and numerous. The plant itself grows from two to four and a half feet tall and rarely branches out. The leaves are oblong to lance-shaped and slightly toothed.

The wild red lobelia likes to grow in wet or low ground, beside streams, ditches, and
meadow runnels. It flowers from July to September and does well in climates such as the Gulf states, west and norward to Kansas.

This wild flower is easily planted from seed.

Curious that the great Blue Lobelia should be the cardinal flower's twin sister! Why this difference of color? Sir John Lubbock proved by tireless experiment that the bees' favorite color is blue, and the shorter-tubed Blue Lobelia elected to woo them as her benefactors. Whoever has made a study of the ruby-throated humming bird's habits must have noticed how red flowers entice him--columbines, painted cups, coral honeysuckle, Oswego Tea, trumpet flower, and cardinal in Nature's garden; cannas, salvia, gladioli, pelargoniums, fuchsias, phloxes, verbenas, and nasturtiums among others in ours.

Great Lobelia; Blue Cardinal Flower (Lobelia syphilitica). This one produces flowers ranging from a bright to faded blue color touched with white. The flowers are about one inch long, sitting on top a tall, erect, leafy spike. The plant grows from one to three feet tall and has a stout, simple, leafy and slightly hairy appearnce. The leaves are oblong, tapering, pointed, irregularly toothed. They grow two to six inches long and half and inche to two inches wide.

The Blue Cardinal flower likes to be beside streams, in moist or wet soil. It flowers from July to October and does well in climates from Ontario and northern United States west to Dakota, south to Kansas and Georgia.

To the evolutionist, ever on the lookout for connecting links, the lobelias form an interesting group, because their corolla, slit down the upper side and somewhat flattened, shows the beginning of the tendency toward the strap or ray flowers that are nearly confined to the composites of much later development, of course, than tubular single blossoms. Next to massing their flowers in showy heads, as the composites do, the lobelias have the almost equally advantageous plan of crowding theirs along a stem so as to make a conspicuous advertisement to attract the passing bee and to offer him the special inducement of numerous feeding places close together.

The handsome Great Lobelia, constantly and invidiously compared with its gorgeous sister the cardinal flower, suffers unfairly. When asked what his favorite color was, Eugene Field replied: "Why, I like any color at all so long as it's red!" Most men, at least, agree with him, and certainly humming birds do; our scarcity of red flowers being due, we must believe, to the scarcity of humming birds, which chiefly fertilize them. But how bees love the blue blossoms!

Linnaeus named this group of plants for Matthias de l'Obel, a Flemish botanist, or herbalist more likely, who became physician to James I of England.

Most Recent Articles