Plants of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden

Wild Blue Phlox is a delicate perennial phantom of the semi-open woods; the mostly erect stems can be from 1 to 1-1/2 feet high, unbranched and finely hairy. Some stems are infertile, some fertile. As the stems are somewhat weak, the plant may tend to lean on others.

Leaves: Each flowering stem has only a few opposite lance shaped leaves that have fine hair, smooth margins with fine hair and are stalkless, clasping to the stem with flat bases. Stems that do not flower have leaves that are smaller, somewhat more ovate, with more rounded tips.

Inflorescence: The inflorescence is a loosely branched cluster (a cyme) at the top of the stem. These clusters have glandular hair.

Flowers: The flower corolla ranges from light blue to purple, about 1 inch across with the 5 flattened (spreading) lobes joined at their bases to form a tube as long as the corolla lobes are wide. The lobes are not notched and are widest near the tips. The 5 stamens and pistil are inside the tube and do not protrude. The outer calyx of the flower is short, dark green with purplish-blue tones, linear in shape with 5 very long narrow pointed lobes (teeth), densely hairy.

Fruit: The mature flowers form an ovoid seed capsule containing several small brown seeds; the capsule, when mature and dry, breaks into 3 sections dispensing the seeds explosively. Seeds require 60 days of cold stratification for germination.

Habitat: Wild Blue Phlox grows from a fine rhizomatous root system in moist woods, partial shade to shade, best with dappled sun, wet-mesic to dry-mesic moisture conditions. They die back by mid-summer after setting seed. Infertile shoots will remain green longer. It does not seem to be a long-lived plant except in the most favorable environment. I say this from personal experience and from looking at the replanting record at the Wildflower Garden (in notes below). Eloise Butler planted it in almost every year she was curator and many times in large quantities.

Names: The genus Phlox covers 67 species, mostly in North America. The word is from the Greek phlox and means 'flame' which referred to a Greek plant that had a flame colored inflorescence atop a slim erect stem. The species name, divaricata, is Latin, meaning "spreading" or "growing in a straggling manner". The author name for the plant classification - 'L.', is for Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), Swedish botanist and the developer of the binomial nomenclature of modern taxonomy.

Comparisons: Phlox flowers tend to look very similar so petal shape and leaves must be checked. Compare - Garden Phlox, P. paniculata; Downy Phlox, P. pilosa; and Wild Sweet William, P. maculata.