Lobelia amoena Michx.

Southern Lobelia

Synonym(s): Lobelia amoena var. amoena

Florida native

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A rare wildflower of seepage slopes, stream banks and floodplain forests of the central panhandle and Walton County. The range extends though the southeast west into Alabama and north into Tennessee and Virginia.
The lavender zygomorphic flowers are two lipped. The upper lip is split longitudinally with the tips erect. The lower lip is three-lobed with a pale or white center. The flowers of many Lobelias are dichogamous, meaning that they go through sex phases to prevent self-polination. These flowers have stamens fused into a cylinder that matures first and pushes the pollen out to land on visiting insects. Then the flower enters the female phase with the style developing and extending out of the tube formed by the stamens and tipped with a two-lobed stigma. This sequence is illustrated here in the close-up photo of two flowers, where the upper flower is in the male phase, and the lower flower in the female.
Stem leaves are elliptic to ovate or oblanceolate, over 1 cm (0.4 in.) wide and usualy more than 3 cm (1.2 in.) long. The stem and leaves are glabrous, or with only a few inconspicuous trichomes. The caylx lobes are small, narrow and extending out away from the base of the corolla.
In this species the margins are entire. Lobelia georgiana (previously Lobelia amoena<.i> var. glandulifera) has glands along the margins of the calyx lobes.