Butterfly pea

stunning Bernieh

Bernieh, you use this in your kitchen ? Every afternoon, we see an elderly lady plucking these flowers off the fences, and she told me she uses the flowers to make nonya kueh ...

Totally tropical - lovely

I love it, it's gorgeous. Reminds me of morning glory...but even prettier :)

Thanks all. This plant is a new one in my garden and while I agree it's a lovely flower, at the moment it's growing like a weed and popping up all over the garden (even found it in the greenhouse just yesterday) - I didn't plant this one. I'm having a hard job at the moment deciding if I want to keep it in a few places or just get rid of it. I'm thinking of pulling out the one in the greenhouse and keeping it as a pot plant, and maybe keeping the one that's in the front garden bed. Let's see if it can be contained.

Autumn I didn't know it was used for cooking - sounds like an interesting dish.

beautiful colour

Never seen ot before...very pretty.

No I've never seen it before either Raquel - it's just breaking out all over the property at the moment. Apparently it's a great success as a legume for beef cattle here in Australia - and while there are cattle around out city I'm not sure how it came all the way out here.

Bernieh
It's used as a colouring. The older generation do not like artificial dye in cooking, so they pluck the flowers of the butterfly pea.

Its used to colour the rice in rice dumpling, and the rice in kaya kuih ... so the rice when cooked, has some blue in it ....

Isn't it strange Bernieh, to you, it's becoming a weed, & to us here, who would love to have it, would probably have trouble keeping it.

Autumn - how interesting that the older generation use these flowers in that way (they know how to make use of things in very environmentally friendly ways) - would never have thought to use them like that!

Pamd - it's true. So many things that grow like weeds here are considered lovely plants there. Lantana is one of them - it's considered a noxious weed here because it just takes over the bush and kills many native plants.

Bernieh, you can use the flowers to colour jelly or other food, dessert ... so it may be useful to keep just 1 vine, rather than kill them all off.

Very beautiful flower!