Cardinal Flower

Aug 16

Written By Wheeler Wildlife Refuge Association

Cardinal Flower Lobelia cardinalis

Poets have written lines about the impact of seeing these intensely vivid-red flowers, many botanists have chosen this as their favorite flower, and though many think this common name alludes to the color of the popular songbird, most accounts attribute the common name as a reference to the color of the robes and hats (and maybe socks, too) of the dignitaries (cardinals) of the Roman Catholic church, with this naming assigned after the plant was introduced from the Americas to Europe in about the 1620’s.

The red of this flower is so vivid it makes an impression on all who see it. The naturalist John Burroughs wrote: “It is not so much something colored as it is color itself”. Thoreau once mused: “Thys sins shall be as scarlet. Is it my sins that I see?”.

While the structure of this flower matches those of the Great Blue Lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica, posted last week) the difference in the proportions of their flowers is as visible as is their color. Great Blue Lobelia flowers are shaped with a lower landing pad of sorts, broad enough to allow for the burly bumble bee to land and become stationary so it can get to the business of crawling/pushing itself down inside the flower to get at the nectar. As this is a tight fit, in the process it also picks up or distributes pollen to the right flower parts.

The primary pollinator for this is the hummingbird (in our area this is the Ruby-throated hummingbird), widely appreciated for their diminutive stature and highly agile flight acrobatics. With Cardinal Flower there is no such landing pad, though the nectar is also produced in the bottom of the flower and the pollen producing parts (anthers) and pollen receptive parts (stigma) are also located at the tip of the upper tube of each flower. Here are comparatively narrow, but very showy, flared-out flags of the color most appreciated by hummingbirds, and markedly less so by bees, which prefer blues. Here the upper tube happens to be at exactly the right place for the hummingbirds’ head to brush into these flower parts while it hovers at each flower, inserts its long thin bill and threadlike tongue and sips up the provided nectar.

During the short life span of a single flower, the male part is the first to mature – pollen is produced and shed, and only after does the female part of that same flower become active. In the last photo see both the white bristled tip of one young flower waiting to dust a hummingbirds’ head with pollen, while just below that is a slightly older flower with a spongy-looking swollen, reddish part now extending past the older, white bristles and ready to receive pollen from a hummingbirds’ head!