The genus is the one that turned the Lowcountry blue. Indigofera gave colonial South Carolina its great cash crop alongside rice, the dye that Eliza Lucas Pinckney coaxed into commercial cultivation around Charleston in the 1740s and that filled the colony's coffers for a generation, made with skill drawn largely from enslaved West Africans. That fortune rested on a tropical cousin, Indigofera tinctoria, but the family trait runs through the whole genus, and the leaves of this one will give up the same blue if you care to steep them. We grow the plant for the flowers instead.
No genus carries more Carolina history in its name than this one. Indigofera means indigo-bearing, and indigo was the blue that built the colonial Lowcountry: in the 1740s a young Eliza Lucas Pinckney coaxed a successful crop out of the land around Charleston, and for a generation the dye stood second only to rice among the colony's exports, made with skill drawn largely from enslaved West Africans, until the Revolution cut the British bounty and the fields went quiet. The plant that did that work was Indigofera tinctoria.
Ted Stephens of Nurseries Caroliniana calls this one of his top ten favorite plants, and the reason is bloom. Indigofera amblyantha, the pink indigo, is a fast, airy, deciduous shrub from the streambanks of central China, a nitrogen-fixing legume in the vast genus Indigofera, and one of the longest-flowering hardy shrubs a Southern garden can grow.
Indigofera heterantha, the Himalayan indigo, is a graceful deciduous shrub from the mountains of the western Himalaya, a nitrogen-fixing legume grown for a long summer-into-fall run of rosy-purple pea flowers over ferny foliage. Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, notes that the species has performed admirably in his Georgia trials, and the plant has earned a quiet following among Southern gardeners for toughness and length of bloom.
