The iconic Texas state flower — a low, mounding winter-and-spring annual legume that carpets roadsides, fields, and hillsides across central Texas with sheets of blue. From a fall sowing it overwinters as a low rosette, then in spring sends up dense, cone-shaped spikes of fragrant pea-like flowers, deep blue with a white (aging to reddish-purple) eye on the upper petal. Native to Texas and a few adjacent areas, it is the species behind the famous spring bluebonnet displays. As a legume it fixes its own nitrogen and reseeds freely, thriving on poor, dry, gravelly, often alkaline soil in full sun — the lean conditions that defeat fussier flowers. One load-bearing caution: like other lupines, Texas bluebonnet is TOXIC. Its seeds and foliage carry quinolizidine alkaloids that are poisonous to livestock and people, so it is a flower to admire, not to eat. Plant it for the spring spectacle and the bees, keep it where children and grazing animals will not browse it, and let it self-sow for next year.