False indigo
Baptisia australis
Indigo pea-flowers over blue-green foliage on a shrubby frame — slow to settle, so plant it where you mean to keep it.
- Type
- Flower · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Blue-green · Green
- Flower color
- Blue
- Sunlight
- Full sun
- Feeding
- Rose & flower
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- May
- Apr–May Spring Growth
- May–Jul Flowering
- Jul–Oct Growing
- Oct–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 2 ft 7 in
- In-row spacing
- 2 ft 7 in
- Between rows
- 3 ft 3 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- A deep taproot
- Working depth
- 3–8 ft
- Can reach
- 10 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 24 in–3.5 ft across, about 0.75–1.25× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 24 in of soil
It mines water and minerals from below anything growing around it, which is what makes it drought-proof and what makes it so hard to be rid of: most of these regrow from any length of root left in the ground.
A legume with an enormous taproot, three metres down on an old plant. It takes years to settle and cannot afterwards be divided or moved, so plant it small and plant it where it can stay.
Figures recorded for False indigo itself. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Beneficial nematodes Steinernema & Heterorhabditis spp.Hunts Vine weevil
Microscopic worms watered onto damp soil that hunt down soil-dwelling grubs and release a bacterium that kills them within days. Timing is the whole thing: warm, damp soil and a small target grub, which means late summer for most of what they are used against.
- Frogs & toads AnuraHunts Vine weevil
A resident toad works the beds every night for slugs, cutworms, and weevils. Recruit them with water — even a sunken basin pond — plus damp shade and an upturned-pot toad house; skip the slug pellets that poison their prey.
- Ground beetle CarabidaeHunts Vine weevil
Fast, glossy night hunters that patrol the soil surface for slugs, cutworms, and root-fly larvae. Give them daytime cover — thick perennial edges, stepping stones, a log — and skip the tillage that wrecks their burrows.
- Hedgehog Erinaceus europaeusHunts Vine weevil
A European animal, and worth saying so plainly: there are no hedgehogs in North America, and the ally that does the same night shift here is the toad, the opossum or the ground beetle. Where they do occur, cut a gap in the fence and skip the pellets.
Peonies, Iris, Salvia, Grasses
Green-leaved flowers, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com