Like a newly-crowned queen, a new perennial has been chosen for 2010.

Last year I scoured the greenhouses, nurseries and garden centers. Anywhere that had something green growing.

Looking for the elusive plant called Blue False Indigo (Baptisia australis).

Finally, I found some. I bought six plants, by the way.

What started my obsession, one might ask? Well, my mother had a large seductive specimen growing almost three to five feet tall with the “sweetest” indigo (blue – really it’s purple in color) sweet pea-like flowers.

Flowers resembling lupines they were. How they beguiled me. Bees and beneficial insects of all kinds, the traffic on this plant was shoulder to shoulder.

Atop thick asparagus-like stalks, draped in dense, cloverlike blue-green foliage.

After admiring my mom’s, I had to have a few in my garden!

Later, arriving home, I found myself doing some research about the plant.
Here’s what I found:

• A tough, long-lived perennial which is very low maintenance. Producing their own fertilizer, being a legume, they develop colonies of nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots. How they love the sun. If planted in light shade, they might need staking. Use a peony hoop.

• Bees and beneficial insects alike absolutely adore their one-inch sweet pea-like “blue” flowers, which are carried atop flowering spikes, growing a foot long above the soft blue-green foliage.

• Branching profusely, producing a rounded form, attaining shrub-like proportions, growing three to five feet high and wide, one must allow them plenty of room. Each forms huge clumps and produces many asparagus-like stems, which are supported by  tough, massively deep, gnarled tap roots. Which, by the way, once this tap root gets ahold and gets settled in and becomes established, it sends its roots to China! And this is no joke, my dear gardening friends. So when you plant one, make sure you have it where it’s gonna be. Otherwise, one might need a backhoe to dig and replant it.

• So your best bet is to start with a small plant. Once planted, have patience. Growing slowly the first year or two, it will take up to five years to reach its best flowering fullness – because you cannot dig one once it’s established. I have tried it.

• They can be grown by seed. The seed coat is extremely tough, by the way. Soak seeds overnight. Germination will occur in a two- to four-week period.

• The seedheads are like thickened pea pods, persisting into the fall. They make for a very attractive dried flower arrangement. Cut pods after they color and hang upside down until dry. Use a rubber band so it tightens as they dry.

• To provide food for seed-eating birds and shelter for over-wintering beneficial insects, avoid cutting back until early spring.

• Blooming in colors of blue, yellow, cream and white. All are drought tolerant, disease and pest-resistant.

• Zones 3-9.

•••
Flowers are the sweetest thing God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
— Henry Ward Beecher

Nancy Wiersma of Dowagiac writes a weekly column.