Look around you for a moment.The sky is blue. The ocean looks blue.But when it comes to living things, that colour almost disappears.

Very few plants or animals are truly blue. Most of what we see as blue in nature isn’t even a pigment. It’s light playing tricks on the eye.

Take a butterfly, for instance. Its wings don’t carry blue dye. Tiny structures on the surface bend and scatter light in a way that makes them look blue. The same happens in some birds and fish.

Even among flowers, blue is rare. Less than 10 percent of flowering plants produce blue blooms. So when a flower grows in the wild and shows up in a shade of blue that feels almost unreal, it tends to stay with you.

High in the Himalayas, one such flower does exactly that.

A flower that takes its time

The Himalayan blue poppy, or Meconopsis baileyi, grows in places where survival itself is uncertain.

In parts of Ladakh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh, the ground stays cold for most of the year. Snow covers the landscape for months, and the window for growth is short.

So the plant grows slowly. It spends years building strength underground, storing energy in its roots. It can take anywhere between two to five years before it is........

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