Androstephium caeruleum, commonly called blue funnel-lily, is a herbaceous perennial growing from corms. It has light blue to violet purple flowers and grows up to 35 cm tall. It is found growing in prairies and on grassy slopes in its native range within Texas

Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

, Oklahoma

Oklahoma

Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

 and Kansas

Kansas

Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...

 of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. It disperses its seed

Seed

A seed is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant...

 by wind

Wind

Wind is the flow of gases on a large scale. On Earth, wind consists of the bulk movement of air. In outer space, solar wind is the movement of gases or charged particles from the sun through space, while planetary wind is the outgassing of light chemical elements from a planet's atmosphere into space...

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Cultivation and uses

The Blue Funnel Lily is among the first of the prairie flowers to bloom - emerging in February and flowering in March in North Central Texas.
There is great variability in the shape and color (sky blue to purple to white) of flowers of the species; they have a faint sweet scent described as
"grape-like". The plant is uncommon in its habitat, black soil prairie

Prairie

Prairies are considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the dominant vegetation type...

, and nearly impossible to find among the prairie short grasses in which it grows.
Fruit set is infrequent - whether due to loss of native pollinators or self-sterility is unknown - and ripens by late April, when it splits open,
presenting the thin, flat black seeds to the wind. The seedling manifests itself as a single thin green leaf - very much like a single strand of thick green hair -
and is easily lost in the prairie grasses among which it grows. First year growth results in a spherical bulb 4 mm to 5 mm in diameter. Over the course of several years the plant progressively pulls its corm deeper and deeper into the soil until it has reached a depth of 2.5 cm to 6 cm. The corm

Corm

A corm is a short, vertical, swollen underground plant stem that serves as a storage organ used by some plants to survive winter or other adverse conditions such as summer drought and heat ....

 was once eaten in West Texas

West Texas

West Texas is a vernacular term applied to a region in the southwestern quadrant of the United States that primarily encompasses the arid and semi-arid lands in the western portion of the state of Texas....

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