Flower Garden Lovers

Dayflowers in the Wildflower Garden - Not!

Beginning with the bluish wildflowers for your garden, our first entry is the dayflower. Below is a section from an old compendium about American wildflowers. It contains not only the factual information as to where to find this wildflower, what it looks like, type of habitat, and flowering season. It also gives some anecdotal information concerning the origins of its name that is quite funny really. Makes you realize scientists do have a sense of humor.

VIRGINIA or COMMON DAY-FLOWER (Commelina Virginica) Spiderwort family

Flowers - Blue, 1 in. broad or less, irregular, grouped at end of stem, and upheld by long leaf-like bracts. Calyx of 3 unequal sepals; 3 petals, 1 inconspicuous, 2 showy, rounded. Perfect stamens 3; the anther of 1 incurved stamen largest; 3 insignificant and sterile stamens; 1 pistil

Stem: Fleshy, smooth, branched, mucilaginous.

Leaves: Lance-shaped, 3 to 5 in. long, sheathing the stem
at base; upper leaves in a spathe-like
bract folding like a hood about flowers.

Fruit: A 3-celled capsule, seed in each cell.
Preferred Habitat - Moist, shady ground.
Flowering Season - June - September.
Distribution - Southern New York to Illinois and Michigan,
Nebraska, Texas, and through tropical America to Paraguay. -
Britton and Browne.

Delightful Linnaeus, who dearly loved his little joke, himself
confesses to have named the day-flowers after three brothers
Commelyn, Dutch botanists, because two of them - commemorated in
the two showy blue petals of the blossom - published their works;
the third, lacking application and ambition, amounted to nothing,
like the inconspicuous whitish third petal! Happily Kaspar
Commelyn died in 1731, before the joke was perpetrated in
"Species Plantarum."

In the morning we find the day-flower open and alert-looking,
owing to the sharp, erect bracts that give it support; after
noon, or as soon as it has been fertilized by the female bees,
that are its chief benefactors while collecting its abundant
pollen, the lovely petals roll up, never to open again, and
quickly wilt into a wet, shapeless mass, which, if we touch it,
leaves a sticky blue fluid on our finger-tips.

The SLENDER DAY-FLOWER (C. erecta), the next of kin, a more
fragile-looking, smaller-flowered, and narrower-leafed species,
blooms from August to October, from Pennsylvania southward to
tropical America and westward to Texas.

From the above description, it is apparent why it has not made the list in any of the wildflower references we use as a good wildflower for the flower garden. Would you want to have a wilted wet shapeless mass in your wildflower garden? Just think of the kids getting into that mess or the pet dog or cat? Even if my flower garden could support this wildflower among the others, you would not find such a quick bloomer there.

Above is a copy of a common dayflower picture as provided by Robert H. Mohlenbrock @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / USDA SCS. 1989. Midwest wetland flora: Field office illustrated guide to plant species. Midwest National Technical Center, Lincoln, NE.

© 2005, Sandra Dinkins-Wilson

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