June 5 Making Sense of Indigos

Back at the Nature Center today and plenty of sun shone onto new flowers including two species of false indigo, a blue variety and a white. The blue seems to have many names, but I will call it Baptisia australis, or wild blue indigo, while the white species is most likely Baptisia leucantha, which is called prairie false indigo or white wild indigo. Let's first figure out what real indigo is. Real indigo, the ancient dye prized in trade is originally from India, and is known as Indigofera tinctoria.That plant has been used for thousands of years to dye royal clothing blue. So both of these pictures show false indigo plants which are native to Wisconsin. On the Great Plains the Cherokee tribes used wild blue indigo flowers to dye things blue and made a tea from crushed roots to relieve pain and nausea. European conquerors followed suit while also importing the real indigo plant from Europe to grow on their homesteads. The false indigos are pea family plants, which grow long and thin with towers of small, compact flowers and long pods of seeds.