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The lovely white false indigo mingles with 'Alamo' switchgrass in my tiny prairie.

I still remember the first time I saw baptisia or false indigo on the roadside.  I was riding down the road near Philadelphia, Mississippi with a friend when I spied a 4′+ mounding plant in full glorious bloom.

I immediately started screaming “Stop Stop Stop!!!” much to the alarm of my companion who thought she was about to collide with some unseen obstacle.  We screeched to a halt and I was out of the truck and running back down the road toward the magnificent specimen.

My Botany teacher, Dr. Sidney McDaniel, identified my pristine white flowered find as Baptisia leucantha. The Taxonomists later got hold of it and renamed it Baptisia alba var. macrophylla as far as I’ve been able to determine.

I had a nursery at the time so I made note of the location and returned to harvest half a grocery sack full of seed pods a couple of months later.  I propagated it and sold it in the nursery for many years.

Baptisia is one of my favorite perennial flowers.    Since it is a a member of the pea family, the flowers are reminiscent of sweet peas but are arranged on an upright raceme.  They are attractive to native pollinators and to honey bees. The fruit is an inflated pea pod that turns purple at maturity.

Baptisia has attractive blue green foliage.  I love to watch it come out of dormancy.  During winter, the dried stalks wither and snap off revealing fat sassy purple buds at ground level.  The buds elongate into asparagus-like stalks before leafing and flowering.

Baptisia is native to the prairies.  It tolerates heavy soil, heat, drought  and full sun.  Its resilience is mostly due to the presence of a long tap root.  It is a deer resistant as well.  Since Baptisia is not palatable to cattle either, large stands will sometimes persist in pastures.

'Carolina Moonlight' baptisia mingles with a hardy gladiolus.

Tony Avent, proprietor of Plant Delights Nursery,  calls Baptisia “redneck lupines”.   It truly is the closest thing to a lupine that we can easily grow in the Deep South.

Plant Delights and several other nurseries sell the hybrid ‘Carolina Moonlight’ which is a the most vigorous baptisia that I grow.   ‘Carolina Moonlight’ was discovered by Rob Gardner as a chance seedling at the North Carolina Botanical Garden.  It is thought be be a cross between the yellow (Baptisia sphaerocarpa) and white (Baptisia alba).  The result is an abundance of creamy lemon yellow flowers.  Since ‘Carolina Moonlight’ is a cross between two species (like a mule) it is sterile and produces no fruit.

In addition to named varieties, there are many species of false indigo that can be found in the wild through much of the eastern U.S.

The blue flowered Baptisia austalis was recently named 2010 Perennial Plant of the Year by the Perennial Plant Association.  The yellow flowered  species (B. sphaerocarpa) is  striking in Louisiana prairie remnants and is reported on the Mississippi Coast.    In Mississippi and most other states with prairie remnants, the white flowered species are the most common in the wild.

Regardless of your local version, all are great landscape plants.  The spring flowers are a delight in the garden or in a vase.  The cool blue green foliage is a nice addition to my garden’s green phase.  The purple inflated pods are interesting in late summer.  In late winter, I anxiously dig around in the mulch for a sighting of the sassy purple buds which will soon erupt into interesting purplish asparagus-like shoots.

There’s something going on in every season except the dead of winter.  All this on a plant that requires almost no maintenance if sited in full sun.

I am happy to know and love it.