Chicory is one of my favorite roadside wildflowers. Like many other plants, it is useful as well as decorative. Most know it as a substitute for coffee when its roots are baked and ground. The leaves, rich in Vitamin C, can be eaten in spring salads.
Blue Sailors, Ragged Sailors, Coffeeweed and Wild Bachelor's Buttons are some of the other names for Chicory.
The chicory flower (blue flower) was the symbol of inspiration for the Romanticism movement (1800-1890) standing for desire, love, the metaphysical striving for the unreachable, hope and the beauty of things.
Blue Flower in the German language is Blauwarte - blue lookout by the wayside - and doesn't that smack of romanticism?
"By the white cart-road,
Dusty and dry,
Look! there is Chicory,
Blue as the sky!
Or where the footpath
Goes through the corn,
See her bright flowers,
Each one new-born.
Though they fade quickly,
O, have no sorrow,
There will be others,
New-born tomorrow.
(My Chicory photo was taken three years ago along a dirt road, dusty and dry, in Adams County.)
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