This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have a wildflower of the high saltmarsh. This week we’re looking at Carolina Sealavender (Limonium carolinianum).
Carolina Sealavender is a perennial wildflower that can reach two feet in height. It’s found exclusively in the saltmarsh, growing in the high marsh along the edges of sand flats. Just outside the meadows of Fimbry and Rush. It’s one of a select few plants that tolerate the harsh life in the saltmarsh and one of the fewer still that sport flowers. A breath of beauty in an oft barren plain. For most of the year it exists as a rosette of simple leaves above the bare sand of the marsh. In summer and fall, Sealavender blooms producing a web of stems punctuated by lavender flowers. Each flower has 5 petals and is less than a quarter of an inch across. What these flowers lack in size they can make up for in the intensity of their color, as well as their volume. Their inflorescence forks in a fractal manner and each arm ends in a line of bright purple flowers. After the flowers dry and the seeds mature and disperse, the flower stalks remain. They can be seen along the marsh edges for months afterwards. Like miniature dormant trees in a fallow winter’s field of salted sand.
