It is more perennial (like lots of things) on leaner drier ground. I suspect your soil is too water retentive. It's an issue I have too (for other things). Not impugning your soil drainage, but how much rainfall you may get..and in particular late winter and early spring soil wetness.

It's not that it's not winter hardy...it's probably (though I don't know) colder in it's native environment than your garden.

You could do an experiment planting one in a scree field (or imitation thereof), could even try a highly porous one gallon pot over winter, sheltered somewhat (like under roof line)?

I adore Linum p.. They are short lived but will seed about the garden. The seedlings look identical to the parent so there is no mistaking them. I would never want to be without so I hope you find some seedlings.

I'm in mid-Michigan, but will share my experience. I grew them from seed three years ago by the winter-sow method. As with many perennials, germination rate was low, but I got two sturdy plants. I planted them in a bed that had recently been reclaimed from lawn by the "lasagna" method. The soil there tends to be sandy loam, and the area gets sun all day. The plants grew steadily and bloomed the next year. This is a plant that blooms every day all season.

We tend to have snow cover most of the winter, but often have a couple periods of bare frozen ground. I didn't cut back the dried stems until Spring. (Maybe that provided some insulation?) Also I left a thin layer of wind-blown leaves on the bed. Lately we've had mild Summer droughts, but I haven't watered them since they became established.

I've found they self-seed like crazy, and this may grow to be an issue. I've moved a few of the plants to better locations and discarded many others. I needed a shovel; the roots are very tenacious. (I think I read that they are used somewhere to stabilize embankments.) I hope this doesn't cause problems with my neighbors. Honestly they are so pretty I want to give them a pass. In this area of heavy deer depredation, they have remained uneaten.

in my experience.. i considered myself extremely lucky if i got a second season out of them .... and eventually i just quite buying new ones ...

many up north plants sold as annuals.. are actually perennial the further south you go ... so get it out of your head.. that just because they are defined as a perennial ... that they reliably come back forever ... some just dont ...

look toward their native habitat ... and try to figure out how divergent your garden is to that.. and perhaps try to replicate that ... i am stunned by claims it naturalizes.. go figure ... but i didnt have the web back then.. so i was winging it on some level ....

btw.. never saw a seedling in my garden ...

being a blue freak in the garden.. trust me.. i tried hard with this one ..

ken

native to Europe, primarily in the Alps and locally in England.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Linum+perenne&t=ffcm&ia=about

Back to growing them lean and dry- there's an alley nearby where it seeds along the dirt road. Full sun, gravelly, sloped. The color is so nice, I'm not sure if it reseeds each year or acts as a perennial.

Rick how did your wallflowers work out? I see them planted next to the flax and since most of mine have died and none have flowered, I'm curious to see if I should keep trying with the survivor.

OK, so I found my seed packet. It's from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and says "Wild Flower Blue Flax" on the front. The blurb on the back says, in part, "This perennial flower was discovered on the Lewis & Clark Expedition, and hence the species was named 'lewisii' ." So I'm thinking it may be a prairie plant rather than an alpine. It goes on to say, "Tolerates poor soil, heat, drought once established." This pretty much describes my situation. As a fixed/low income senior, my gardening style is very low input. I knew the former owner, and other than a couple foundation shrubs, a peony, an old-fashioned climbing rose, and some ditch lilies behind the garage, the lot had never been gardened until I moved in seven years ago. My improvements have consisted of compost and mulch, and there's never enough of those. The water in my rain barrels mostly goes on a couple of tomato plants. My original two flax plants still look healthy, surrounded now by numerous babies.

We usually get about 3 years out of them, from volunteer seedlings. The first year, they are small an don't bloom. The second, and maybe the third year, they are gorgeous. Then the next year they are dead, dried up former plants. There are enough seedlings to replace the dead ones, but barely.

The plant in the picture looks like a cultivar to me. the straight species may work better, particularly regarding seedlings.

I'm growing the blue flax from seed, but I don't have any high expectations it will return after year one. Like Ken, I've tried them a couple times and they were not reliable so i quit too. There are similar things not blue like Cerastium that will hang in for dear life and never give up the ghost. I don't know why i sowed it again? Maybe because it's blue or it was the final thing before the kitchen sink. I think it is a moisture issue. I like that porousity experiment idea. That's really cool! Nice tutorial lol!

Hi, finally catching up on all these great responses. It is a gorgeous flower and worthy of much conversation. I discovered it only insofar as it was a component of a wildflower seed mix from American Meadows that I sowed on a late afternoon just before a snowstorm in December 2016. By Spring 2018 many gorgeous perennials and biennials had grown from that seed packet, including our beloved blue flax.

On the American Meadows page, it calls it "Linum perenne" but elsewhere says "This species is named "lewisii" in honor of Meriwether Lewis..." so I'm not sure if it's L. perenne, the old world native, or L. lewisii, the American native. But apparently sometimes L. lewisii is called L. perenne var. lewisii just to make things interesting.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a drainage issue, though many plants right next door to it made it through the winter just fine. (A notable exception was a Penstemon 'Prairie Dusk', and of course all penstemon need really good drainage.)

Katob, good eye with noticing the Siberian Wallflower growing right next to it, and it came in the same seed mix. Apparently depends on the growing conditions it can act either as a biennial or a perennial, and sadly for me it was a biennial, just blooming in 2018, then, along with its neighbor the Blue Flax, returned to the dust from whence it came.

That gorgeous blue and stunning orange were the highlights of my spring garden last year. I don't know yet if I have seedlings to carry on the tradition.

I used the Linum perenne as a dwarf cultivar in a planting design wich was planted in spring 2016,

the few survivors appear in gaps between other plants,

and it is outcompeted by stuff like Nepeta or Geranium

lovely plant though-

the soil mix is very gravely and meant to be non-compacting, the plants are far from starving

even the perennial poppy thrives thanks to good drainage, that is a plant which often rotts when wet winter meets our heavy soils

and we do get many seeldings of all the nice perennials in there.

that`s from last week

and just to get an impression of the situation, the whole bed, April 2017

I have tried growing Linum perenne a couple of times. The first time it only last a short time and didn’t reseed. My current plant is at least 5 years old and also hasn’t reseeded but hasn’t died. I think the key here in New England has been mentioned above: lean, well-drained soil. My soil is sandy, and the part of the bed with the flax is mulched with gravel and has no added organic matter. It slopes so winter wet runs off.