Michigan Didiscus

Didiscus, better known as blue lace flower, forms softly domed clusters of tiny star-shaped florets held on slender, faintly fuzzy stems. Its signature shade is a hazy periwinkle-to-sky blue, a genuinely rare color in the cutting garden, though it also appears in lavender, soft pink, and clean white. The effect is both airy and romantic, working as a delicate filler and a gentle focal accent that flatters almost any palette.

Blue lace flower is not a Michigan native. It comes from Western Australia, where Trachymene coerulea grows wild on sandy coastal ground, and its membership in the carrot family gives it the lacy, umbel-shaped heads it shares with Ammi and Queen Anne’s lace. In Michigan it performs as a tender warm-season annual, started fresh each spring and cut through the heat of summer, generally July into September. Because a true, soft blue is so hard to find in any flower, our member farmers grow it on purpose rather than counting on it to naturalize.

Didiscus resents transplant shock and sudden heat, so it rewards the attentive, small-scale growing that a collective of Michigan farmers can give it, cut at just the right moment and moved quickly into cool water instead of trucked in from far away. That freshness is why the stems you pick up hold their delicate blue rather than arriving tired and browning at the edges. Reserve a DIY bucket to arrange yourself, ask to have it featured in a bucket for a project, or let our floral designers build it into something for your table.