Taking Inventory: Cornflower

Did you know that the cornflower is the most beautiful of Minecraft’s many flowers? Well, sure, it's my highly personal opinion, but it’s true! Its bright petals lift the spirits of even the weariest villager, while its deep blue dye is fit for royalty. It even puts a spring in your step when stewed. That, dear reader, is why I... I mean we... are crowning it today as our item of the month.

Cornflowers have not always been a part of Minecraft’s rich collection of flowers – it wasn’t until the Village & Pillage Update, in April 2019, that these beautiful blooms arrived in the Overworld – alongside lilies of the valley and wither roses.

To find cornflowers, you’ll want to seek out plains biomes. If you’ve got a flower forest biome nearby, which contains many different flowers of all kinds, you’ll find it there too. But cornflowers generally like wide open spaces and so they’re easy to find in the plains. You’ll also find them in mountain meadows.

Once you find one, you can grab it by hitting it with any item or even your hand. But if you like to do things the complicated way, you could also push a block over the flower with a piston. Once you’ve got one, we recommend putting it in a flowerpot and admiring it. But if you must, then you can easily convert it to blue dye in a crafting grid, or stir it into a suspicious stew for a jump boost.

In the real world, cornflowers got their name because they used to be a common weed in crop fields. They’re native to Europe, but while they can now be found distributed quite widely across the world, they’re actually endangered in their native habitat by the mass use of weedkillers on European farms.

Cornflower petals are actually edible, though they don’t have a lot of nutritional value or flavor. When they’re added to food, it’s mainly to bring their beautiful blue colour. They’re also used to dye some food products, and show potential for cleaning up contaminated soil.

Cornflowers also appear widely in folklore – worn by young men in love. If the flower quickly faded, it showed that the man’s love wasn’t returned. It’s also used as a political emblem in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia.

In Minecraft, though, it’s just a pretty flower. So gather as many as you like, and decorate your home with their bright blue blessings.