This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’ve got a shrubby symmetrical sun-loving sand ridge wildflower, Forked Bluecurls (Trichostema dichotomum).
Forked Bluecurls are found throughout the Atlantic Coastline of the United States and across all of South Carolina. It’s an annual plant, growing about knee to waist high, into a small upright bush. They grow best on dry, sandy soils and are common under pine savannas, on our Sea Island sand ridges, and along sunny upland roadsides. The stems of Forked Blucurls are covered in dense, fine hairs and often blush a burgundy-red when growing in full sun. Its leaves are light-green, small, simple, diamond-shaped, and oppositely arranged. That opposite arrangement gives the whole plant some visual symmetry and its “forked” first name. But it owes its surname to it flowers.
From the start of September through mid-October, Forked Bluecurls are in full bloom. The bush becomes emblazoned in a brilliant glow of purple-blue flowers. (“Blurple” being the technical term for this color.) Each flower is about a half-inch in size and held upright. The flowers have four short blue petals reaching left and right and a fifth long petal flowing forward and down with a blue tip and a white middle speckled by blue spots. Overtop the petals hangs a great curled arch of four anthers and one stigma. This flower is a carefully crafted apparatus for enforcing efficient pollination. When a bee approaches for a landing, that white patch on the lower petal beams in reflected ultraviolet light, like a runway beacon guiding its way. Once the bee touches down and leans in for nectar, those blue curls scrape against its back, depositing and extracting pollen. It’s a very effective system and, consequently, Forked Bluecurls are a prolific self-seeder. Despite being an annual, they’re a plant that can be relied upon, year after year, to return to any yard or native plant garden. Albeit, not always where originally intended!
