Flower Fairy Field Notes

Deception of the Lace Flower

June 2025

For about a month I’ve been calling her wild phlox. Turns out she’s actually dames rocket, also known as false phlox.

The easiest way to tell the difference is that dames has 4 petals, phlox has 5. Dames also blooms earlier, late spring - early summer. True phlox blooms later in the summer and is generally not growing wildly in BC.

I had to do quite a bit of research to figure out who this flower was, so I learned a thing or two along the way. They were introduced to North America in the 1600’s as a garden flower. They escaped from gardens and found their way into ditches, near roadways and at the edges of woodlands. I am always delighted at the idea of flowers escaping out of gardens.

They are fairly aggressive self seeders and will spread. They are now considered invasive, but they don’t seem that bad to me. They show up in tasteful little clusters. Unlike the broom brush invasion which is out of control, spreading yellow chaos all over the place.

The Dames on the other hand, spread beauty around, and they keep it classy and pretty minimal. Can you stay mad at them? Personally I love seeing them in the wild. They remind me of lace, I now call them the lace flower. When I mentioned this to my robot, it chimed back with a lovely visual:

“they are like embroidery stretched across the roadside”. I love robotic poetics.

Interesting to note, before this year I somehow never even noticed this flower. So this is my first year getting to know the Dame.