This is a white variety, with pretty, delicate white flowers. Phacelia viscida is very much like P. grandiflora, and has about the same range, but is not so large a plant, usually about a foot tall, with smaller flowers, about an inch across. The corollas are blue, with purple or white centers.
Wild Canterbury-bell
Phacèlia Whitlàvia
Purple
Summer
California
Charming flowers, though the foliage is rather too hairy. The stout, reddish stems are hairy, brittle, and loosely branching, about a foot tall, and the leaves dull green and hairy. The handsome flowers are in graceful nodding clusters, with a bell-shaped corolla, about an inch long, a rich shade of bluish-purple, the long conspicuous stamens and pistils giving an airy look to the blossoms. The filaments are purple and the anthers almost white and, as in other Phacelias, when the corolla drops off the long forked style remains sticking out of the calyx like a thread. This grows in light shade in rich moist soil in the hills.
Phacelia grandiflora.
Wild Canterbury-bell—P. Whitlavia.
Phacelia viscida var. albiflora.
Alpine Phacelia
Phacèlia alpìna
Lilac
Summer
Utah, Nev., etc.
This just misses being a very pretty plant, for the leaves are attractive, but the flowers are too small and too dull in color for the general effect to be good. The stems are about ten inches tall, purplish and downy, and the leaves are dull green and rather downy, with conspicuous veins. The buds are hairy and the flowers are lilac and crowded in coiled clusters, to which the long stamens give a very feathery appearance. This is found in the mountains, as far east as Montana and Colorado, and reaches an altitude of over twelve thousand feet.