Cardinal Flower | Lobelia cardinalis

🌿 Ships well rooted in a 3.5 x 5 inch deep pot. Well established root system and ready to plant!

There is no native plant that stops a ruby-throated hummingbird faster than cardinal flower. The blooms are engineered for it: tall scarlet spikes of tubular flowers timed precisely to the southbound hummingbird migration in late summer and fall, with pollen deposited directly on the top of the hummingbird’s head as it sips nectar, transferred flower to flower as it moves down the spike. The color is electric, the kind of red that reads across the yard and stops you mid-step. Swallowtail butterflies, long-tongued bees, and sphinx moths work it alongside the hummingbirds. It grows naturally along stream banks, pond edges, wet woodlands, and boggy areas, and in the garden it brings that same vertical drama to rain gardens, moist borders, and anywhere you can keep the soil consistently wet. Flower spikes rise 2 to 4 feet and bloom for a month or longer from midsummer into fall.

It’s a short-lived perennial that offsets freely at the base and self-seeds in good conditions, naturalizing into a self-sustaining colony over time. Mulch the crowns going into winter and keep leaves from smothering the basal rosettes that overwinter at ground level.