Sisyrinchium nashii 'Suwannee'

Sisyrinchium nashii 'Suwannee', Nash's blue-eyed grass, is a small, enchanting native perennial of the Southeastern United States, selected from populations in Florida's Suwannee River basin. Despite the common name, this is no grass at all but a diminutive member of the iris family, Iridaceae, betraying the kinship in the fine, flattened, fan-arranged foliage and the six-parted, star-shaped flowers. The species honors George V. Nash, the American botanist who described so much of the Southeastern flora.

From late spring into early summer, and often for two months or more, 'Suwannee' lifts a haze of soft sky-blue flowers, each with a bright golden eye at the center, on slender stems just above the foliage. The blooms open with the morning sun and draw small native bees and other pollinators, closing again as the day cools. The fine, iris-like leaves form a low, tidy, semi-evergreen clump that holds a neat presence long after the flowers finish.

Nash's blue-eyed grass grows wild in moist meadows, pine flatwoods, and open ground across the coastal plain, and carries that easy adaptability into the garden, thriving in sun or light shade and in soil either dry or moist. The 'Suwannee' selection is prized as much for a long bloom and a compact, well-behaved habit as for the conservation value of keeping a distinctive regional native in cultivation.

Use 'Suwannee' at the front of a border, in a rock garden, along a path, or drifted through a meadow or native planting where the blue can pool at ground level. The fine foliage and starry flowers read beautifully among low sedges, coreopsis, and other sunny natives, and a mass of the plant makes a soft, sky-blue carpet in late spring. Give sun to part shade and ordinary well-drained soil, divide the clumps every few years to keep them vigorous, and let the blue-eyed grass seed gently into the planting.