United States / Grow / Colorado blue columbine

Colorado blue columbine (Aquilegia caerulea)
Photo: (c) Owen Strickland, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Colorado blue columbine

Aquilegia caerulea (accepted: Aquilegia coerulea) · Ranunculaceae · all Aquilegia records · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Aquilegia caerulea begins with Fact Sheet 6.305 for ignition-resistant landscapes, its selected source lineage. The evidence table identifies the pack as limited evidence; its row produces the computed on-list direction.

The hardiness evidence section remains available beside related plants for record navigation. The genus page supplies the wider index for Aquilegia, without adding support to caerulea. Those routes keep the fact-sheet citation, evidence limitation, and computed direction attached to the colorado blue columbine entry; return to the evidence table for its accepted source basis within the named caerulea record.

Form
perennial
Mature height
~2 ft
Water need
high
Rated in
Colorado / Rocky Mountain Front Range
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
Colorado / Rocky Mountain Front Range
Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source
  • Ignition-Resistant Landscape Plants (Fact Sheet 6.305) · Official scoped edition
    • CO; partial normalized coverage · 2025-07-01

      Colorado State University Extension and the Colorado State Forest Service publish Fact Sheet 6.305 for Colorado's WUI and varied ecosystems. FireApproved exposes all 114 exact source owners at Colorado publication scope while retaining score, elevation, water, and Idaho-carrier lineage. Publication scope is not suitability for every Colorado site or zone.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AZ, CO, ID, MT, NM, NV, SD, UT, WY.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 4a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

How to read this page

The status above is computed from the cited rows below: independent recommendations can support a fire-resistant result, an avoid row can produce keep-away, and disagreement stays visible as conflict. Placement notes preserve each source’s own scheme rather than translating unlike rules into one scale. This is evidence about a plant, not permission to plant it in every part of the defensible space; Zone 0 remains noncombustible.

Plant hardiness evidence

These values describe the plant source. Your ZIP zone comes from the separate 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Whole-zone values stay whole-zone, and a single unresolved value is not treated as a tolerance range. Different source boundaries stay separate: overlapping statements are compared independently, while only ranges with no shared zone are called a conflict.

Where its sources say to plant it

Placement rules below use each source's own distances or named zones, tied to its rating. They are not interchangeable with the directory's current Zone 0 guidance.

The evidence

Grouped by what each source concluded. Primary evidence rated the plant itself (a lab, field program, or original curation); corroboration compiled or republished another source's rating and resolves to its root lineage.

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Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

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Aquilegia caerulea (Colorado blue columbine). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/aquilegia-caerulea/. Last verified 2026-08-23.