Quaker-ladies

Houstonia caerulea, known as Quaker-ladies, bluets, or innocence, is a delicate diminutive perennial herb of the Rubiaceae family native to eastern North America. From slender fibrous roots it forms a small basal rosette of spatulate to oblanceolate leaves 5 to 15 millimetres long, with a few smaller opposite cauline leaves on each erect or ascending thread-like stem. The stems reach 5 to 20 centimetres in height and bear, at their apex, a single solitary tubular flower about 8 to 12 millimetres across. Each flower has a four-lobed corolla of pale blue, lilac or occasionally white petals fused at the base into a short tube, with a conspicuous golden-yellow eye at the throat; the species is distylous, producing both pin and thrum flowers on different plants. Blooming occurs from early spring into early summer. The fruit is a small two-lobed capsule containing many minute brown seeds. The plant grows in moist acidic soils on open meadows, grassy clearings, lawns, cliff ledges and stream banks from Newfoundland and Ontario south to Georgia and Alabama.