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Virginia Spiderwort

In my rambles across the fields these past couple of years, I've noticed that often lilies with the most vivid coloring have the most ephemeral blossoms.

Chicory  and  Blue-eyed Grass flowers, for example, hardly make it through the morning before fading away, spent, before noon in Virginia  

The orange blossoms of Scarlet Pimpernel  are no more by mid-afternoon.

Aptly named, dark blue Asiatic Dayflower does last the whole day, and so, too, does this Virginia Spiderwort—but no longer.

But, although each blossom is short-lived—"never to bloom again....New buds will unfold to tinge the field on the morrow." Indeed, these short-lived bloomers produce an abundance of blossoms, so that over a longer period one can truly say that "even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

As we have noted alien plants brought to North America, sometimes turn out to be a curse instead of a blessing, because of "unintended consequences."

Tradescantia virginiana, however, which is a native perennial, reversed the flow of this pattern of species introduction to a foreign environment: In this case, the movement was from North America to Great Britain. 

After being collected and described in Virginia by the noted 17th century botanist, John Tradescant, it was exported to Great Britain. Since then, with intended consequences, it soon became and remains a popular garden plant.

Go to the Main Directory to consider more lilies of the field.