Powdery Alligator-flag
Thalia dealbata · Garden flowers
Powdery alligator-flag, in fruit
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 14 August 2025
A spray of small purple-black fruits on a single arching stem, backlit enough to lose whatever green was left in them. The flower itself is long gone.
This is the hardy water canna, or powdery alligator-flag, which stands in the shallows at the pond edge with canna-like leaves and throws up zigzag sprays of small violet flowers in midsummer. By August they have set into hard round fruits dusted with the white powder that gives the plant its name. A native of the American South that copes with a New York winter as long as its roots stay underwater.
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