Colorado blue columbine (Aquilegia caerulea)
has blue and white flowers
with five sepals that are pale to sky blue and five petals shaped like sugar scoops and generally paler than the sepals, sometimes even white, and they project backward into spurs.
It flowers from June to August high in the mountains from Western Montana to northern Arizona and northern New Mexico.
It is the Colorado state flower. The flowers vary in color to white, pale yellow and pinkish. Three years ago when Dave Kenison and I did Mount Sneffels in Western Colorado we saw these blue and white beauties and I felt like they were some of the most beautiful flowers I'd ever seen.
While with Sam and Andrew on our recent trip to Colorado, we saw them around 11,800 feet below Mount Sherman and at about 11,400 feet near Mount Belford.
We stopped many times to admire these beautiful flowers which add so much to the enjoyment of being in the high mountain country.
So beautiful. This post makes me think of the old girls' camp song that had these lines: "Rain falls, soft rain, making puddles / And the columbine are bending their heads in the rain."
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