PlantFiles: Pale Corydalis, Rock Harlequin
Corydalis sempervirens

I love this plant. I have never found it to be invasive, as some reviewers have said. I only wish it was for me! I have grown it off and on for 30 years. Here in the South and in Massachusetts. You rarely see a flower with this color combination. The contrast with the blue green leaf is striking. A favorite.

Love it it grows in my rock garden and is very pretty.. new for me, will have some for trades at end of summer

Bought one of these beautiful plants at a local nursery. It flowered wonderfully. I planted it but the next year I was sad to see it did not come back. A month later I was cleaning out a corner of old flower pots and was wonderfully suprised to find four new babies, flowers and all growing out of a pot filled with dirt and broken bottles. Don't know how the seeds made it there but I was. Needless to say I picked out the glass and spinkled spent seeds back in the pot. Hope I'll have new babies next year. And yes the plant was advertised as an perennial, but now I see it's probably a reseeding annual.

I found it growing at the top of a rocky hill under power lines. It's got to be tough.

Growing it in 2007 as a gift... The information here c.f. self-seeding is very important. I thought it might be perennial, but a self-seeding annual can be a nuisance. Many thanks to previous contributors concerning this item. Note: I do like the foliage and the flowers.

While C. sempervirens has beautiful little flowers it reseed profusely and will take over a flower bed. It is only suitable for wild areas. It grows as both an annual and a biannual. Seeds witch germinate early in the season will bloom and die in one season, but seeds witch germinate late in the season will over winter and bloom the second season. Seed can remain dormant for many years. Once it has seeded into disturbed soil, it will continue to reappear for a long time. I have been pulling it from one area for the past four years, and the area is currently full of sempervirens.

Rock Harlequin grows wild in Northern Minnesota, which is where I got the seeds to start mine. They have a strange tendency to appear and disappear from year to year. I think that the plants are biennial. Full sized plants never show up the following year. One year I'll have a couple, the next year, none will be visible, then the following year I'll have dozens. Sprinkle the seeds and just let them do their thing. Definitely could become invasive, but prodigal. The form is very similar to a columbine, though it's actually a relative of the bleeding hearts. The bluish foliage is interesting. Mine usually bloom from May to June, starting even before the Aquillegias.

I just found one of these at our camp near Clearfield, Pennsylvania. It was just starting to bloom and I hope to be able to harvest seeds from it.

Corydalis sempervirens is a hardy annual. The foliage is a blue green and is multilobed. The flowers are pink with a yellow tip and have a single spur. They are also known as Capnoides sempervirens. They grow between 8-30" and do best in full light in dry gravelly soil and in open woodlands. These flower from July to September and favor climates with cold winters and cool summers. These flowers set a lot of seed and my have a tendancy to be invasive if not kept in check. This is a very pretty flower.