Color variation

Photo by Jim Jung. All rights reserved.

Larkspurs

Wild Larkspurs are beginning to bloom now. Members of the Buttercup family, these short (usually less than a foot tall) wildflowers with the dark purple flower spikes will be blooming for most of this month.

Larkspurs are calciophiles, meaning that they like to grow where the soil is high in calcium. This tends to limit the plants - in our area, at least - to sites underlain by limestone. Further north where the soils have (relatively) recently been stirred by the last glacial advance, and are therefore fairly rich in calcium, colonies of larkspurs can occur just about anywhere. Should you attempt to grow this species in the garden be generous in your application of lime.

Flower & seed pods

Photos by Ruby Jung. All rights reserved.

Larkspurs are named for the prominent "spur" - an elongated and pointed extension - on the back of the flower which apparently reminded someone of the foot of a lark. These spurs contain the nectary of the flower and their placement requires that only pollinators with the right equipment get the sugary reward they contain. The right equipment consists of an extra long proboscis which can reach the nectary. And their owners - bumblebees - are busy all this month visiting them for both nectar and pollen to feed their developing brood.

Not all pollinators play fair however. Some bees with tongues too short to plumb the spur's depths land on the back of the flower and nibble a hole large enough to insert their shorter tongues and suck up the nectar. Of course flowers so treated are not pollinated, but this doesn't seem to inconvenience the Larkspurs all that much since, where they occur, they occur in numbers.

Offsite links:

• Wildflowers of the Southeastern United States Dwarf Larkspur
• Vanderbilt University's Delphinium tricorne page
• Range Map

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