Category Archives: Prairie Plants

Ahead of the Game

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Do you suppose we’ll run out of wildflowers before the summer’s over?

I’m only half kidding.  With the extraordinarily warm winter and spring we’ve had, it seems like everything is way ahead of schedule this year, and I really do wonder what will happen as the season progresses.  Most wildflowers are blooming between two and four weeks earlier than average this year.  A few individual plants are even further ahead than that, including the switchgrass plant I saw blooming last week and the patch of flowering Missouri goldenrod I saw yesterday.  Dan Carter at Kansas State University wrote last week to say that in Kansas he’s seen big bluestem blooming – and even heath aster.  Now that’s just crazy.

I photographed this prairie larkspur flower on June 18, 2009. This year, larkspur has already been blooming for a couple of weeks, and looks like it will be done before the 1st of June.

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Sunflowers: Staring Me Right in the Face

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It’s awfully frustrating when I fail to solve a puzzle – especially when all the information I need is right in front of me.  As an ecologist, I’m supposed to be good at this sort of thing.  Ecologists, after all, study the interactions between plants, animals, and their environments.  Why it’s taken me so long to figure out why annual sunflowers are so abundant in some places/years and not in others is beyond me.

But I think I’ve got it now.

Annual sunflower, aka garden sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is a very large plant with conspicuous blooms. While they’re considered to be weeds by most farmers, they are native wildflowers and important food sources for insect and wildlife species.

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