Inflata is the ONLY species and 200 years ago the seeds were $1,000 a pound, today they are very rare and expensive. "IF" you use the pure seed, your going to have a medical grade formula extremely powerful, so be careful and understand this powerful herb. A small amount will cause the lungs to throw up, somehting few people could handle.

MH

Lobelia is one herb that I took an interest to early on when I started trying to learn herbs. My interests were definitely heightened from reading some of the Lobelia anecdotes in the Christopher SoNH book.

Since then, I've been trying to find somebody (an herb shop) that will sell me some of the plants already growing, but I'm still looking. In the mean time, I have seen a variant of Lobelia being sold at a couple different nurseries, but this variant is being sold in the "flower section", and best I can tell, this is a hybrid or modified version and not Lobelia Inflata. There are a couple other clues. One is, these nurseries have 3 different "colors" of these flowers, like Blue Moon, Paper Moon and _____Moon ( I forget the other). It seems that somewhere along the way, commercial flower sellers took to using the word Moon as something to advertise their variants of Lobelia with. When I first found these last year, just to confirm my curiousity, I bought a six-pack, planted them in the flower garden. This produced a very low growing plant (6 of them) that did not flourish at all, but produced 6 small plants each with tiny and delicate features, eventually they sprouted very tiny blue flowers, one group was a bit darker blue than the other, the other was a bit more purplish blue, neither of them produced seed pods. I'm pretty sure that what these are/were were a test-tube variant made only for ornamental purposes.

Meanwhile, I continue to keep my eye out every time I walk the dog here and there. This part of Pennsylvania is said to be a climate / environment where Lobelia grows naturally. I have not found it, yet. Part of the problem for me is that I generally do not stray too far into the meadows and woods due to my inclination to suffer from an acute sensitivity with poison ivy. Wild Lobelia is said to flower mainly from mid to late summer.