PlantFiles: False Indigo
Baptisia 'Purple Smoke'

very trouble-free here, but it flops unless I put a peony ring out for it. Bloom time brief, but foliage is very pretty.

A beautiful Baptisia, easy to grow, vigorous and healthy. It takes a couple of years to really get going but once it does it really is beautiful. I've had zero problems with it. Mine is planted in a spot that receives about 4-6 hours of mostly morning and mid-day sun.

Transplanted from my friends yard - it was coming up under her sidewalk (it had spread and grown so much over the years). I planted it and I only had some leaves come up all summer - no blooms. So we shall see next year. I planted it in heavy clay soil. She said to give it time to root and grow down. It was really hard to dig up and replant. The roots are really, really deep. See picture.
2011 - it is coming up and looks real good. I have added a picture of the stems coming up in case someone doesn't know what to look for. It looks real healthy.

We set one of these out late in 2006. By 2009, the performance was impressive. The clump lifted two dozen blooming stems. Over the summer the many smallish leaves and branches knitted themselves together so tightly that a stiff wind after hard frost broke all the stems off together and tumbled the crown down the hill.

We like it for the way it holds up down through most of the warm season grass show by continuing to grow new leaves down into September. Spring growth is early, barely waiting for the average date of last frost, mid-May here, to go into bloom. In the fall, the foliage is much more frost sensitive, turning black at temperatures it easily survived in the spring.

Voles can be a serious problem for the Baptisias. Tunneling under the snow, they consider the roots a major food resource.

Very nice plant. Still looks good, shrub like, even in the heat of August. Flowers were unusual in color, looked nice with Tradescantia 'Bilberry Ice.'