Following a two week hiatus, we returned to the Forum Nature Area, in Columbia, Missouri, to find brilliant purple spikes rising from the restored bottomland prairie. These were the flower stalks of the prairie blazing star, a perennial herb native to the tallgrass prairie of the American Heartland. The component flowers, festooned with fuzzy white anthers, bloom from the top to the bottom of the stalk, yielding a cat-tail appearance as the season progresses; indeed, this plant is also known as the cat-tail gayfeather.
Favoring the wet prairies of stream valleys and river floodplains, this attractive wildflower grows from a tuber (or corm) and spreads by windblown seed as well; the colorful flower spikes bloom from mid July into September. Pollinators include various bees, butterflies and moths while the plant itself is consumed by deer and other large herbivores; rabbits and groundhogs feed on seedlings while prairie voles feast on the corms.
Hardy and easy to establish, prairie blazing star is found in natural and restored prairies from Minnesota to the Gulf Coastal Plain and from the eastern Dakotas to the eastern Great Lakes region; in light of their attractive flower spikes, they are also planted in urban parks and suburban gardens throughout the country. In concert with black-eyed susans, thistles, various goldenrods and sunflowers, blazing stars herald the season of purple and gold wildflowers that typifies Midwestern grasslands from late summer to mid autumn.
