Colorado Blue Columbine Aquilegia coerulea
Colorado Blue Columbine is a perennial wildflower native to the lower 48 states. It blooms May – Jul.
More about this plant
Aquilegia coerulea, commonly called the Colorado columbine, Rocky Mountain columbine, or blue columbine, is a species of flowering plant in the buttercup family, native to the Rocky Mountains in the western United States. It is a moderate sized wildflower that grows in mountainous areas from the foothills to above timberline. The flowers are mainly pollinated by bumblebees and several species of hawkmoths. The species has been the state flower of Colorado since 1899 and with its large, showy flowers is a frequent garden plant and used in the breeding of columbine hybrids. The botanical name coerulea means 'sky blue'. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Purple AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~12 caterpillar species
Aquilegia supports ~12 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Aquilegia in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 7 bee visitors
7 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Colorado Blue Columbine :
+ 1 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Colorado Blue Columbine — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Aquilegia →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (21) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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