Beautiful Blue

They usually come in something inbetween midnight blue and aubergine naturally. This is almost a bit to lively electric purple, but of course in the area are many farm gardens with cultivars, and busy pollinators getting around.

Hmm, the one native where you live would be Aquilegia canadensis I guess, I thought it is usually a pale buttercream colour in the middle rather than such an intense banana yellow, also it got at each steem on average more, but much smaler blossoms and stands not as tall. At least those in the Great Lakes region are this way. I saw them in the years we lived overseas very often.

I know the gaudy forms in all colours of the rainbow sold for the garden are often hybrids not possible if people would not have mixed the traits of those and then a few more, like the species group that mostly grows in the Rockies and the Ural with the paler blue and pure white combinations and the hardy Aquilegia shockleyi that has the brightest yellows and survives in the dryer climate of the american west. And then there is the Munstead Columbine, which I think is just an albino of the eurasian nominate flower and the gardencenter claims is the very oldest Aquilegia cultivar in the western world, known since the dark ages, and then there are weird pink ones from asia, without the knees at the blossoms that do not look like columbines at all.

There are btw a few stands of like regular Canadian Columbines looking ones living on the fringes of the same forest where I took this picture, but they are very close to cultivated gardens. Thats the price of us humans mixing it all together. John Tradescant exported Aquilegia canadensis still in the times of trappers and fur traders, we got that almost 400 years on the continent. Guess you got about as much big purple Aquilegia vulgaris growing here and there in the sticks. :o)