FRIENDS OF EDGEWOOD NATURAL PRESERVE

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A CLOSER LOOK AT THE FLOWER BLUE-EYED GRASS

By Bob Young

This is the second of a series of articles describing the flowers pictured in our wildflower brochure. — ed.

Photograph by Sonja Wilcomer

Blue-Eyed Grass is shown in the brochure "Common Native Wildflowers of Edgewood," published jointly by the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society and Friends of Edgewood Natural Preserve.

It blooms in moist, open, grassy places from March to May. The generally purple, six-pointed flowers with yellow centers are on the sides and at the end of the flower stalk. It can grow from four inches to twenty inches tall. The leaves, shorter than the flower stalks, are flat, narrow, and grass-like.

The flower color can vary from purple to a very pale blue, rarely white. They open in the morning and close in the afternoon. Individual flowers have a short life, but they are replaced daily during the blooming season by new flowers.

Blue-Eyed Grass is in the Iris family of plants, not in the Grass family. Although in the Iris family, Blue-Eyed Grass does not have the usual Iris shape of three sepals pointing out (or down) and three petals pointing up.

Its scientific name is Sisyrinchium bellum (pronounced sis-ih-RlNK-ee-um BELL- um). Back in about 300 B.C. a disciple and successor of Aristotle named Theophrastus gave Sisyrinchium its generic name. In Greek, sisy means pig and rinchium means snout. It was said that pigs grubbed out the tubers of this plant.

Blue-Eyed Grass was first designated as Sisyrinchium bellum in 1876 by botanist S Watson.

On the Pacific Coast, Blue Eyed Grass is found in California and Oregon, generally less than 7000 feet in elevation.

Since the eye of the flower is not blue, and the plant is not a grass, maybe we should heed the words of Edith S. Clements who wrote, in 1928, in her book Flowers of Coast and Sierra, "...the name grass iris is preferable to that of blue-eyed grass commonly used." Or for our Edgewood Natural Preserve, we could give it the name that Toni Corelli sometimes uses: "yellow-eyed, purple iris."

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