Prairie Blazing Star, Tall Blazing Star, Kansas Gayfeather, Cattail Gayfeather

If I had to pick a favourite colour, purple is it! And this flower has such a beautiful colour. We bought two cultivars from the nursery ...Read Moretwo years ago and they are still coming up. An interesting thing is sometimes their first flowering is white, but then is purple every year after.

The area is shaded part of the day and once or twice a year gets flooded from the run-off of the surrounding industrial fields. Oh, I cringe when that happens with all the chemicals they place on those things... I hardly remember to water the plants, so they usually just get what the Creator provides. But so far, our Blazing Star is doing well.

One bad thing about this is if you have it surrounded by lawn and you are yanking up those grasses, the early leaves resemble what you are trying to get rid of. I nearly did one in this spring. They have a different texture and a white stripe along the center of the leaves. I've been very careful of that since then.

I planted four open pollinated Blazing Stars to fill in the area and believe they will do fine.

It is a beautiful plant, but needs competition./ support or it is likely to flop.

The flowers are pollinated primarily by long-tongued bees, butterflies, and skippers. Other visitors include Halictine bees, bee flies, a...Read Morend day-flying moths. Among the long-tongued bees, are such visitors as honeybees, bumblebees, Little Carpenter bees, Miner bees, and large Leaf-Cutting bees. Butterfly visitors include Monarchs, Swallowtails, Painted Ladies, Sulfurs, Whites, and others. The caterpillars of the rare Schinia gloriosa (Glorious Flower Moth) feed on the flowers and seed capsules. Various mammalian herbivores readily consume Prairie Blazingstar. Younger plants may be eaten by rabbits and groundhogs, while mature plants are likely targets of deer or livestock. Small rodents, such as the Prairie Vole and Meadow Vole, sometimes eat the corms. An overpopulation of these animals can make establishment of this plant difficult in some areas.

This is a beautiful plant that resembles a fairy wand. Prairie Blazingstar can be readily distinguished from most other blazingstars by the sharply recurved bracts subtending the flowerheads. Other species usually have smooth, straight bracts that vary in their shape or hairiness. The size and showiness of the flowers can depend on the local ecotype. There are some wild populations of plants with white flowers, although they are rare. This plant blooms after Liatris cylindrica (Cylindrical Blazingstar), but before Liatris aspera (Rough Blazingstar).

I planted bulbs last spring and didn't expect much the first year, but all of them came up and bloomed beautifully! They didn't need any ...Read Morespecial attention, just your regular care and maintenance.