Blue Toadflax

About the Blue Toadflax

A wisp of a wildflower that paints sandy ground pale violet every spring. Blue toadflax holds its tiny snapdragon-shaped flowers - each with a slender curved spur - on wiry, nearly leafless stems that seem too thin to stand, and a big colony moves like haze in the slightest breeze.

It is a true native annual (in older books filed under Linaria), specializing in the poor sandy soils that defeat showier flowers - old fields, roadsides, post oak country, and river terraces. It often blooms alongside pointed phlox and spiderwort in the same lean ground, arriving with the bluebonnets and finishing by early summer.

Look closely and the flower rewards it: two-lipped, white-throated, with that delicate nectar spur trailing behind - a design aimed at small bees and butterflies with tongues long enough to reach. The buckeye butterfly also uses toadflax as one of its caterpillar host plants, so the colony feeds two generations at once.

Photographing it is an exercise in patience with the wind - get low, wait for the lull, and let the violet haze stack up into the background.