Blue Columbine

Aquilegia brevistyla

Bird foodPollinator plant

No openly-licensed photograph of this species is in the catalogue yet. We show a photo only when we can credit the photographer.

Growing it

When	Flowers June to July
Type	wildflower
Sun	Partial shade, full shade
Water	Medium
Soil	pH 5.5–7
Hardiness	zone 2–7
Mature height	0.5 m
Mature spread	0.45 m
Spacing	0.3 m
Years to maturity	2
Bloom	Jun–Jul
Flower colour	Blue checked against its common name
In bloom	June July
Native to	AB, SK

feather-compound leaves about 6 cm long

Where it has been recorded

BothSpecimensObservations

131 squares of about 28 km, each holding at least one record. A square is not a claim that the plant grows throughout it, and an unshaded square is unrecorded rather than empty. Darker squares hold more records, which follows roads and towns as much as it follows the plant. 50 herbarium specimens and 346 field observations this project may redraw. A filled dot is a pressed sheet somebody can re-examine; a hollow ring is a photograph identified by community agreement. Where the dots are dense is where people have looked, not where the plant is commonest, and empty ground is unsurveyed rather than unoccupied. How this map is made.

Which ecoregions the records fall in

Aspen Parkland central AB / SK: 182 records, high confidence
Mid-Boreal Uplands central AB / SK: 102 records, high confidence
Northern Continental Divide south AB: 98 records, high confidence
Western Alberta Upland central AB: 67 records, high confidence
Eastern Continental Ranges central AB: 66 records, high confidence
Boreal Transition central AB / SK: 21 records, high confidence
Wabasca Lowland north AB: 18 records, medium confidence
Slave River Lowland north AB: 15 records, medium confidence
Peace Lowland north AB: 11 records, medium confidence
Fescue Grassland south AB: 7 records, low confidence

These are counts of records collected somewhere in the region, which is the resolution of the evidence: the map above shows where inside it. A region with 3 records is not the same claim as one with three hundred, so the count travels with the region. A region missing from this list means nobody has recorded it there, which is not the same as the plant being absent. Records within 900 m of a border count for neither side, because the border is not drawn finely enough to say which one they are on. Source: GBIF occurrence search + PRESERVED_SPECIMEN pass, retrieved 2026-08-24. Boundaries digitised from the National Ecological Framework for Canada v2.2 (Ecological Stratification Working Group 1995), simplified to about 900 m for display: an outline is accurate to roughly a kilometre, not to the metre. How these counts are made.

See every observation, live and current, on GBIF or iNaturalist.

Documented animals

7 documented relationships.

nectar for

Black Swallowtail Specimen records from iNaturalist.org
Brown-belted Bumble Bee Specimen records from iNaturalist.org
Bumblebees Wilson & Carril 2015
Central Bumble Bee Specimen records from iNaturalist.org
Ruby-throated Hummingbird Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Rufous Hummingbird Cornell Lab of Ornithology

pollen for

Hunt's Bumble Bee Clements & F. L. Long 1923

Also worth knowing

Safety

Low toxicity to pets; Low toxicity to people

Buying it

About $8–$16 per plant (estimate), usually stocked by garden centres. Estimate (herb default); AB retail as of 2026

Where these numbers came from

Flower detail: not verified, a genus-level estimate