There is a common wildflower blooming right now that some call blue sailor. It’s a name rooted in a legend that involves a beautiful girl who fell in love with a sailor who left her for the sea. She waited and waited by the roadside for his return. She waited so long that she was turned into blue sailors. The sailor legend is paraphrased from “The History and Folklore of North American Wildflowers” by Timothy Coffey.
Today this plant is called chicory and, though it’s not an Ohio native, it is adding lots of color to many roadsides. Yes, it is that chicory, the one advertised as a coffee substitute.
Chicory can grow in thick stands, surviving even in hard gravel berms wherever it can take root. You’ve surely seen it with its multi-rayed blue flowers spaced along a tall nearly leafless stalk. The flowers are about 1-1/2 inch in diameter on stalks that can grow as tall as three to four feet in height.
The bee-like insect nectaring on the chicory flower is a syrphid fly, also known as a hover fly or flower fly.
The chicory plant, above, was photographed by Art Weber, Metroparks Toledo nature photographer.
