The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Aquilegia coerulea
Also called Rocky Mountain Columbine, Colorado Columbine, Blue Columbine, Giant Blue Columbine
Colorado blue columbine is a perennial wildflower native to the Rocky Mountains, prized for its large sky-blue flowers and grown in gardens and used in breeding columbine hybrids. It thrives in cool, well-drained conditions and dislikes heat and wet feet.
Aquilegia coerulea, commonly called the Colorado columbine, Rocky Mountain columbine, or blue columbine, is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family, native to the Rocky Mountains in the western United States. It is a moderate sized wildflower that grows in mountainous areas from the foothills to above timberline. The flowers are mainly pollinated by bumblebees and several species of hawkmoths. The species has been the state flower of Colorado since 1899 and with its large, showy flowers is a frequent garden plant and used in the breeding of columbine hybrids. The botanical name coerulea (or caerulea) means 'sky blue'.
Colorado columbine is native to the Rocky Mountains from northern New Mexico to southern Montana. It grows in all of the mountainous western half of Colorado and Wyoming. Additionally it grows in every county of Utah, parts of Nevada, and northern Arizona. It is listed by the USDA as growing in Idaho and South Dakota, but without county level distributions. The species was reported to grow in the Caribou–Targhee National Forest in eastern Idaho in 1973. Though the geographic center of the range is in eastern Utah, the greatest number of plants is found in the mountains of north central Colorado.
Aquilegia alpina · Aquilegia bertolonii · Red columbine · Golden columbine · Fan columbine · Western columbine · Oriental Columbine · Columbine · Columbine
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Aquilegia coerulea by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
