The Cardinal Flower

By Joyce Corson
Guest Columnist

SYRACUSE — The cardinal flower is a brilliant scarlet-colored native wildflower that grows in marshes, stream banks and low woods. Its extremely showy blossoms can be recognized at considerable distance. Few native plants have flowers of such intense color as this common herbaceous perennial.

Joyce Arleen Corson

This cardinal flower’s, campanulaceae (bellflower), shiny leaves are alternate with a toothed margin and their rhizomes overwinter with small rosettes of leaves.

Brilliant red blooms first mature in late summer and continue into mid-fall. The showy flowers begin opening at the bottom of a terminal flower spike and continue to the top.

Propagate this plant either by seed or by separating the rosettes from the parent plant in the spring. Here in my garden it is sharing space with the pink Joe-Pie Weed, eupatorium purpureum. It is far from an unwanted weed to me, one of many beautiful native that lasts through fall.

It had appeared in the wetland near our home. You can also, after blooming, lay the spent flower stalk down on the ground and put a rock on top. New growth will evolve, under the rock if soil is kept moist.

I learned more about this plant from a speaker on native plants at a Master Gardener plant workshop. The speaker explained the lobelia was unique in that it would bloom after the seeds were rooted with a water source that was dependable on following the rise, flow and drainage that would allow the seeds to mature sprout and grow after the flow would reside! I could achieve this system by sculpturing the design of the garden beside the entrance to our home.

This plant is effective in moist areas of woodland, shade gardens, wet meadows, or along streams or ponds. Also water gardens and rain gardens. It adds late summer bloom and height to borders as long as the soil is kept uniformly moist. It attracts hummingbirds and butterflies making it a welcome addition to a pollinator garden.

A number of hybrid cultivars of the cardinal flower have been produced; the most popular is “Queen Victoria” with blood-red flowers and bronze foliage.

Plants are the foundation of life. They use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide from the air and water into food. This simple process, photosynthesis, provides the energy animals need and the oxygen we all breathe. Plants are powerful.