Prairie Blazing Star is common throughout the tallgrass region of the Midwest, often in spectacular displays on cherished native prairie remnants.  However, in Kansas it is usually found in pristine native prairie hay meadows in the eastern fourth of the state—east of the Flint Hills.  Within this area Prairie Blazing Star grows on prairies that have enjoyed special stewardship by landowners who have not sprayed the meadows with herbicides, subjected them to substantial grazing, or harshly harvested the hay with a frequency of more than once a year.  

Another common name is Thick-spike Gayfeather. The slender, spikelike plants grow up to five feet tall, but are more commonly about three feet high.  Prairie Blazing Star is a native perennial growing from a woody corm.  A Nebraska source suggests that the Pawnee boiled the corm and leaves of Liatris to make a medicine for children with diarrhea.  Flower heads were also ground and mixed with shelled corn and fed to horses with the belief it would make them swifter.

The most impressive display of Prairie Blazing Star that I have seen and photographed in Kansas was on a 10-acre native prairie hay meadow south of Topeka in Osage County. Robert T. McElroy, M.D. of Topeka, owns the meadow.  Dr. McElroy is currently Chairman of the Board of Trustees for Audubon of Kansas.  Last year, in 2009 Dr. McElroy decided to forgo hay harvesting for a year and allow the native forbs and grasses to flower and produce seed.  As illustrated by three photographs included below, the sheer beauty of the visual display and obvious value for biodiversity was remarkable.

When it comes to roadside or native prairie meadow wildflowers, Prairie Blazing Star in bloom is a plant that can stop one in his or her tracks to think how incredible they appear.  I have the good fortune to own land along McDowell Creek Road six miles south of Manhattan adjacent to a short stretch of roadside that has a stand of Prairie Blazing Star.  It is the same stretch of roadside that had impressive displays of Grayhead Coneflower in July.  I’ve been told that a person who previously worked at the nearby NRCS Plant Materials Center many years ago scattered discarded wildflower seeds along the roadside.  That seems logical since there are no nearby naturally-occurring seed sources, even on Konza Prairie, that I am aware of for this beautiful plant.

This plant no longer occurs in the vegetation nearest to the county road, probably because periodic broadcast herbicide spraying eliminated it and other native forbs there. However, as one can see in the photos below with Grayhead Coneflower in full bloom (and Prairie Blazing Star “preparing to flower), the spray distance was only about 15 feet into the vegetated roadside at this location, and the native grasses have been retained.  If the full width of the right-of-way had been sprayed, the roadside photos of all of the wildflowers at this site would not be possible.
 
A distance of nearly 30 feet was sprayed with herbicides a couple years ago and eliminated the scattered Prairie Blazing Star plants--and an impressive stand of Jerusalem Artichoke--on the same right-of-way a 100 yards to the west between our pasture driveway and Kings Creek.  Disturbances of various kinds and removal of established native perennial plants leaves a void that is often invaded by noxious weeds (such as field bindweed) or simply annual “weedy” plants that have far less appeal.  In this case we now, we have Giant Ragweed and Marestail (see photo).

We are planning to address and highlight the insidious multi-agency “War on Wildflowers” (and other native vegetation) masqueraded as a simple “weed control” with public funds and usually on public land vegetation and habitat resources in Kansas on this website in the coming weeks.  We have many compelling examples with before and after photographs.

A few years ago a scattering of Prairie Blazing Star grew along the Kansas Turnpike rights-of-way near Lecompton.  However, the right-of-way was repeatedly annually mowed at the season these gayfeathers began to flower, and that section of the roadside has since been reconstructed.

Liatris pycnostachya is an iconic native prairie plant in Missouri, and that is illustrated by the opening photo for a feature article on management of Prairie-chickens in the August 2010 edition of the Missouri Conservationist.  The article focuses on patch burning and is entitled “A Win-Win For Prairie-chickens and Ranchers” and can be viewed by clicking here.



Photos and text by AOK Executive Director, Ron Klataske


To nominate a native wildflower, or to send photos of a native roadside wildflower, click here