Here is the second installment of my somewhat nerdy attempt to document the the plants of my prairies

26. Narrow-leaved Purple Coneflower. To me, this is the flagship of the dry prairies. It is diagnostic of whether a pasture is native grass or not. If it has purple coneflowers, it is native. Though not heavily grazed, it is sensitive to prolonged overgrazing, so one might say it is diagnostic of native pastures with the potential to be brought back to better range condition. I have thousands in my native prairies and probably have thousands in the restoration. Plants seem to need to be three or four years old before they bloom. and this year, with good rains, meant that hundreds of plants that had been small, vegetative plants the past few years bloomed in the restoration. The plant is a veritable chemical factory, producing both the chemicals that caused Native Americans to chew the roots for toothaches and that has supplied the health food industry with material for teas to sooth, heal and ramp up the immune systems of their clientele. I just like to chew the roots and provide others the opportunity to try. It’s hard to describe the effect; it doesn’t truly numb the mouth like novocain, but provides a very strong tingling sensation that some (me) find pleasant and others find unpleasant. I have gathered and spread a great deal of Purple Coneflower seed and it has been another big success in the restoration. When I was in college 50 years ago I would dig roots for my roommate at nearby prairies, prompting him to say, “Give me some root, roomie. Gotta have some of that root!” He was an entertaining roommate, much better than the previous roommate who was dealing weed and hashish that he was storing in our dorm room’s refrigerator, and totally trashed our room when an alarm clock went off when he was sleeping one off. Below is a picture I recently used in another post of a hill in a native prairie that had been burned 8-10 weeks earlier.

27-29. Prairie Onion (Allium stellatum), Nodding Onion (Allium cernuum) and Meadow Garlic (Allium canadense), Unlike the textile onion, mentioned in the last installment of this series, these are all summer blooming onions, blooming in July or early August. The only one of the three that I have in my prairies is the prairie onion, but I have added the other two to the restoration as they are documented to be in this area. The meadow garlic can be found in a prairie just a couple miles away that I look at occasionally. I have not gathered seed there as it is owned by a remote landlord, an older gentleman who lives a couple hours away, and I have never contacted him for permission, but my young friend, Levi Waddell, collected seed (actually bulblets) from another nearby site and I have been distributing them in appropriately mesic sites. An interesting thing I have noticed in plant descriptions in various botanical websites is that quite a few species that I see as mesic, avoiding the dry gravel hills and thriving near the base of the hills, are described in the literature as inhabiting dry environments. One of the best things with my restorations being adjacent to native prairies is that I have a model to follow as I try to establish species in appropriate sites. While some species are flexible in their preferred home, many have found their desired landing spot in a fairly specific environment where they are best able to compete. The prairie onions, which are common in my native prairies are almost always found in a band along the bottom half of the hills, where the convex and concave parts of the slope meet, but not in the valleys where they cannot compete with thick brome grass. This picture below is a fair representation of their favored type of site. I have gathered a lot of onion seed on my prairies the past few years, and have a fair amount, perhaps 200, in the restoration. There are thousands in the native prairies.

30. Pincushion, or Ball Cactus (Coryphantha vivipara) I have known that we have cactus in the prairie hills as long as I can remember, seeing them in the spoil bank cuts where the section line trail was cut 130 or so years ago. As far as I knew for most of my life I had assumed that was the only place they were found, perhaps 10 or 20 plants along the trail on the hills. If I was vaguely aware of them in the pasture or hayland, my memory is inexact. Then, in 2017 I accidentally started a fire on the hayland in Section 11 which burned most of those 23 acres, plus parts of the two pastures near it. Now in plain sight, I saw many more little cactus plants, looking scorched and dead. Here is what I saw later that summer.

Not only had I not killed them (I may have killed a few), I had stimulated them to bloom and divide. I am not sure whether the stimulating factor was the nutrients released by the fire or the removal of the grass thatch that cools the soil, but I saw blooming cactus everywhere the burn went over the top of the gravel hills. They are only adapted to a few acres in my prairie, and can be very hard to find when blooms are absent (unless you kneel on them), but I now estimate close to 200 in the three native prairies, and perhaps four or five that I have transplanted into the restoration. I have transplanted more into the restoration, but after an entire growing season in the SDSU greenhouse they were the size of a marble and it may be years before they grow enough to bloom so I can find them. Even when they bloom they seldom pollinate and grow cactus berries full of seed, but I was able to gather some in 2022, perhaps 50 berries full of seed in a gooey jelly, which then became the transplants that I have put out the past two years. I was able to gather a few more this past summer, and perhaps the crew at SDSU will grow some more seedlings for me. I get a kick out of how hard they work, first to attract a pollinator with their gorgeous flowers, and then to attract a seed disperser, probably a rodent, with their berries, shown below.

31. Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata) Blanketflower is the plant that poleaxed me to teach me the concept of local adaptation. The seed that was used grew wonderfully the year after the restoration was first seeded, and then almost all of it died during a tough stretch the first winter. After looking at the seed tags I found that the seed was sourced in Colorado. What???? Local adaptation is an intuitive concept, that plants with a genetic history in a geographic area are likely to do better than plants that do not have a genetic history in an area. I would have agreed with that statement when I was in high school. However, I guess a person can know things without truly understanding them; without intuitively knowing the ramifications; without fitting that knowledge into the process of making an informed decision. Let’s be blunt: I was naive and totally clueless. When I put the seed order in for the original restoration seeding, I was being aided by Ben Lardy, working for the Conservation District, who has become a partner in this project. Ben came up with a species list that fit the CRP guidelines, perhaps tweaked by communication with the vendor, Milborns Seed, and I approved it. Thus, you could say we share blame, but the real blame was in the guidelines which did not specify a geographic parameter to help Milborns or Ben winnow out inappropriate choices. And I obviously didn’t provide effective oversight. Shit happens. I have spread blanketflower seed which I have gathered several times since then . Not every plant died that first year, and most of those that did had made seed which may still be contributing to the restoration so I probably now have a mixed stand. An interesting question is: when can I assume that blanketflower seed that is produced here is locally adapted? There has very likely been cross pollination between the Colorado plants, the plant that grew from gathered seed, and the blanketflower that grows in the adjoining pasture just a hundred yards away from the location in these pictures. And my carefully considered answer is: “Hell if I know.” Seriously. Obviously, I could now market seed from here as locally adapted as it is thriving after six years. Just as obviously, I could not do that while feeling honest. I have no idea what percentage of the genetics in the plants below are from Colorado and what are from my gathered seed. As one of my goals is the promulgation of locally adapted seed I have a fallback position. The Huggett restoration, on the far upper right corner of this picture, about three quarters of a mile away, has only received blanketflower from gathered seed. It is adjacent to a different small pasture with a lot of blanketflowers. Any blanketflower seed that I sell, or even give away, described as “locally adapted”, will come from there. A final note on this wildflower is that it is very tolerant of grazing, but very intolerant of pasture herbicides. One neighbor’s pasture which is consistently overgrazed is full of them, while another adjacent neighbor, who grazes with much more restraint, never had as many blanketflowers, and may have killed those plants off with an aerial application of herbicide a few years ago

32. Northern Bedstraw (Galium boreale) Northern bedstraw is one of the forbs that I was unaware of until I started planning for this project as it blooms in late June into July when my business kept me working 60-70 hours per week. It has beautiful small white blooms, growing in thick, rhizomatous patches that can be thick patches of delicate flowers. As a plant that puts a lot of energy into clonal growth it can be a bit reticent to put resources into flowers and seed, and where it grows on droughty soils it rarely blooms, and even when it blooms it rarely makes seed, relying on the clonal growth. Where it grows in more mesic areas it is far more likely to reproduce by seed, and occasionally there will be significant seed to gather. To my surprise, a wet spring and early summer failed to produce much seed to gather last year. On the other hand, as a species that doesn’t have to make much seed, I feel that I can be aggressive in harvesting that seed when I get the opportunity. The flip side of that is that I end up harvesting all my seed from what may be very few clones and thus get limited genetic variability. I had bemoaned my poor luck in getting any bedstraw going in the restoration until 2023, when I saw a couple plants. Then with the good rains on last spring and summer I suddenly saw many more in the restoration because they were blooming. Without blooms they are a humble, cryptic little son of a gun. If each of those plants start clonal patches I will be seeing many more bedstraw plants in the future.

33 and 34. Yellow Grooved Flax (Linum sulcatum) and Lewis’s Blue Flax (Linum lewisii). I put both of these together as I have quite a few of the former in my prairies (though few to none in the restoration) and I have yet to see any of the blue flax in my prairies, though I have quite a few in parts of the restoration where they were in the CRP seed mix. My discussion will be about the yellow flax. Several fond memories from my childhood revolve around flax, not the wild kind, but the crop with origins in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. We always had a flax field to two, selling the grain to make various products, primarily linseed oil, long before there was the food craze of eating flax seed for its healthy oil profile. We ate flax when I was growing up, snacking on the whole flax seed as we harvested. In high school a flax straw processing plant went in for getting fiber from the straw (linen comes from flax fibers, as well as industrial uses). Flax flowered for 2-3 weeks, fields of blue flowers which opened overnight and dropped their petals by sunset, waiting for the next cohort of flowers to open for the next days pollination. They were beautiful and had a pleasing odor, even to a clueless, adolescent farm boy. My job was always to get up in the truck box to stuff rags in any cracks, as the seed were small and flowed like water. Thus when I first noticed the yellow flowers across the hills and looked closely it was obvious to me they were a flax, closely related to tame flax. At first I was suspicious they were an escape from tame flax which had gone back to yellow flowers after inbreeding, but a little research confirmed their native origin. Yellow flax is an annual, so in years without early summer rain there may not any flax germinating and blooming. Last year however, had the proper rain. We gathered a lot of seed, and could have gathered ten times more had we taken the time. It is a bit like the superblooms of annual flowers in the California deserts for the same reason. When there is rain the prime directive is to grow, bloom, make seed and then die to await another rainy June. Below is a hill where I gathered a fair amount of seed, but there were many acres that looked like this. And two, four, or perhaps even ten years later, if we get late June rains it will look like this again.

And here is a handful of ripe flax from which I might shell out 1000 seeds. I don’t remember how long I was on my hands and knees to get this handful, probably 10-15 minutes, but it is a very satisfying job. There were many handfuls more. Blue flax is not the same as tame flax that was grown as a crop either, but a perennial native forb which is found in this area, though I have never seen them in my prairies. I do, however, have some in a part of the restoration seeded with the CRP mix by the Conservation District.

35 and 36. Purple Prairie Clover (Dalea purpurea) and White Prairie Clover (Dalea candida) While other plants I have been writing about make me excited, I am afraid I find prairie clovers a bit boring, though not for any good reason. They are legumes which grow in droughty soils, the purple in xeric to dry mesic, and the white in xeric to very xeric. That alone should spark my respect. In my native pastures purple prairie clover is fairly common, while the white prairie clover mostly stays to the thinnest soils on the ridges, where it seems to be very competitive. I have gathered quite a bit of seed from the purple, usually blending it into bags of the general mish mash of asters, goldenrods and sunflowers that I gather in September and October. I couldn’t find a picture of the D. candida, but here’s a picture of the purple from the restoration in early July. Much of both clovers in the restoration came from seed purchased from Milborns for the official CRP mix. The plant in the picture below is likely one of them. Seed is very reasonably priced and it establishes very well for a legume, most of which are slow, so I have a lot in the restoration. Since then I have gathered and spread a lot of my native prairie clover seed in all the restorations, but much like the blanketflower (one of which is almost done blooming in the upper right corner of the photo) I have no idea which plants came from my gathered seed and which from purchased seed. Thus, at least for a few years, no seed from the restoration will be sold as a “local selection”, though they have been there long enough now to have proven that they are adapted. Maybe I will revisit that decision in a few years, but for now any seed I sell or give will be from my prairies.

There are two other Daleas which are likely in my restoration in small amounts. I was given some seedling plugs from golden dalea (Dalea aurea) and silky prairie clover (Dalea villosa) by a grad student of Dr Lora Perkins who no longer needed them, and I had the time to plant some of both. Neither is native to any prairies around here, but they are both western species adapted to droughty soils, so I am ok whether they made it or not. I may look for them this coming summer out of curiosity. I do like my legumes.

37. Green Milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora) This is one of my favorite species, one of the five forbs for which I have planted the most seedling plugs, It is fairly common in my prairies, but generally widely spaced, growing almost entirely on the gravelly hills. As cattle don’t eat it, and it is seemingly not very competitive when grass competition is strong, it is more common on the grazed pastures, and less so on the 25 acres which were only hayed until recently. I have only identified a few in the restoration, but I expect to see the fruits of both the transplants and a fair amount of very careful seeding, placing seed individually into the soil in appropriate areas. I believe it is fairly long-lived, and blooms and makes seed when it is damn good and ready. I will probably grow plugs of it for one more year before I move on to other species. It is native to a large part of the United States, and thus is likely genetically diverse, with my drought-resistant plants possibly quite different from green milkweed growing in the eastern part of the country. Thus, this is a species for which I hope to distribute seed to others. One example of that genetic heterogeneity is the different leaf shapes green milkweed exhibits. Most of my green milkweed have wavy oval leaves, but a few have long skinny leaves that fold lengthwise lie a long skinny book that is partially opened. When I first saw the difference I assumed the two types were different species, but was surprised when I found there were two widely disparate leaf types in the same species. Unexpected stuff. Pictures will be provided this summer.

38. Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias verticillata)

Above is a good example of what rain can do. This is a patch of blooming whorled milkweed, perhaps a single aggressive clone. The previous year, after a hot dry June, when I searched for it I found a few spindly vegetative shoots. As a strongly rhizomatous species, whorled milkweed is under no pressure to reproduce. A little food to keep the underground growth healthy is all that is needed. I may have seen only 20 or 30 emerged stems. This year, ten inches of rain in May and June induced hundreds of underground crowns to emerge, bloom and try to make seed. Unfortunately the rain shut off in early August causing many of the pods to abort, yet I still harvested at least 40 pods, perhaps 1000 seeds, and left 100 more pods to fully mature, open and spread a lot of seed to blow around and find a new home. While a species that reproduces clonally is theoretically eternal, whorled milkweed patches seem to come and go over the years. For a species whose seeds blow in the wind to travel the seeds are fairly large. When a seed is able to find a good spot, there is sufficient resources to establish a strong plant. New patches tend to turn up near old patches, so I am not sure if their genesis is clonal or seed. I have found a few in the restoration, and am hopeful of establishing more, and then let them spread on their own. In the native prairies I have about ten patches. Below is one from the restoration with aspirations to become a colony.

39, 40 and 41. Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), Oval Leaf Milkweed (Asclepias ovalifolia) and Showy Milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) Milkweeds are a deal lately because of the obligate relationship with Monarch butterflies. For the first half of my agronomy career they were an enemy, taking yield away from crops, especially soybeans. Then Roundup was developed, and suddenly we knew how to kill milkweed. It is rare now to see a single milkweed in a farmed field. It is not rare to see them in other places; they are very common in road ditches, overgrazed pastures and waste areas. The seeds blow everywhere and must be quite viable. I spread a few in the restoration, but have no idea whether the common milkweed that I now see out there are from the seed that I spread or seed that blew in from other places. As such, they are not a priority for me. The other two milkweed species, on the other hand, are native to my prairies in small numbers, and I would love to increase them in the future. I have planted a few plugs of the oval leaf, so I may have some out there. And a goal for this year is to gather seed of both to have seedling plugs grown. The milkweed below grows in the area of the restoration which had to be treated with thistles, this area twice, giving an example of its tolerance to many broadleaf herbicides. Thus, while I had to kill some of the very few wildflowers which were attempting to establish themselves in the thistles, I didn’t kill all of them. This picture was taken the year after the second herbicide treatment four years ago, showing a little damage. There are now many very healthy milkweed plants in that twenty acre area. A personal aside is that I became very interested in wild foods when I was in high school, mostly inspired by my maternal grandmother, who grew up with wandering Native Americans camping in her yard in the 1890’s, and who learned about wild foods from them. Then , Euell Gibbons published some folksy books on the topic, the first, “Stalking the Wild Asparagus”, in the 1960’s. He only became popular in the early ’70’s when he was featured in a Grape Nuts cereal commercial (“Tastes like wild hickory nuts”). I found out from his book that milkweed was edible, and I eat a couple flower buds or a young pod or two every year. I only found out many years later that they are poisonous in large quantities, though I doubt that would have discouraged my 16 year old self. Young men do not tend to be very careful or discerning. At that age a common, local insult was, “You’re dumber than a shovel!” The truth is painful sometimes.

42, Rose, or Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) The genus Asclepias is very successful, perhaps because of its chemical defenses, and comes in all shapes, sizes and habitat preferences. While green and whorled milkweed favor dry, and even droughty sites, and common, oval leaf, and showy milkweed favor mesic sites, swamp milkweed likes its feet wet. There is little need to seed this species. There are enough wild ones on the edges of wetter areas that they will blow in to colonize appropriate areas. Once again, pictures this summer.

43 and 44. Downy Gentian (Gentiana puberulenta) and Bottle Gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) Downy gentian blooms at the other extreme of the season from pasqueflower, often well into October when the landscape is starting to turn brown with nighttime temperatures below freezing. That contrast, much like the contrast in April with the pasques, causes it to be shockingly beautiful. There is so much contrast to the surroundings that it will turn a person’s head when in view. It is almost impossible to get a bad photograph of it.

I have found perhaps 30-40 spread across my prairies, with several established in the restoration so far. The NPI lab of my friend Dr. Lora Perkins started 50-70 plugs from seed that I had supplied in the fall of 2023, but the seed is tiny, and the plants grow slowly, so they are overwintering at SDSU for me to plant in May or June. I assume that they are fairly long lived as they are not consistent bloomers, with individual plants blooming perhaps every other year. However there seems to be hundreds of tiny seeds in each dried up flower, so a small bit of seed gathering can go a long way. Gentians are a species of concern in South Dakota, on the western edge of their range, but around here they are not very rare, as I have found them in several other prairies that I visit, but they are never abundant. Thus I have high hopes for getting a lot more started this year.

Bottle gentian are not found in my prairies, but are found in many near my place, so I hope to get a population started in the restoration. They colonize full mesic soils, as opposed to the dry mesic sites used by downy gentians. I have a few plants that have started along a drainage in the restoration that surprised me greatly as they likely came from some seed gathered by a friend, one of several happy accidents in the restoration.

45. Hairy False Goldaster/Goldenaster (Heterotheca villosa) Hairy goldenaster is yet another of the humble little forbs that inhabit the gravel hills. Unlike the early bloomers, it begins to bloom in late June, and continues to bloom for most of the summer. This means that it is physiologically able to respond to rain to make seed for a much longer time than most wildflowers. It also means that it is very difficult to gather a lot of seed, as while a single plant may have 50-100 flowers, only a few have ripe seedheads on any partricular day. However, like other asters the seeds blow in the wind and colonize distant sites quite well. I have quite a few in the restoration, which are as likely to have blown in from the ones inhabiting the pasture nearby as to be due to seed that I have spread. The first picture is the aster in a variety of grasses, with needle and thread seedheads leaning everywhere. The second picture is the same plant in a wider view showing it with some neighbors which indicate the environment where it is at home: with pincushion cactus, blanketflower and fringed sage.

46. Golden alexander (Zizia aurea) One of the many big successes of the restoration was golden alexander. It was part of the mix that I bought from Milborns, desired as an early bloomer and reasonably priced. It is adapted to mesic sites, a tall prairie species, and thus uncommon in my xeric native prairies, but grew everywhere in the restoration, even in clearly inappropriate spots. That is slowly fixing itself as the years go by, as it has already died along the gravel ridges, though still hanging on in sites such as the one below towards the base of a hill. It has the added benefit of being almost impervious to Milestone herbicide which I use to spot-treat the worst Canada thistle patches. Thus it is insulated from the herbicidal destruction of a thistle patch where most wildflowers are at least slowed down, if not eliminated. I remember one patch was so thick with thistles that I saw nothing else, not even grasses, so I took my chances on a high rate of herbicide. to start over on a 40 by 100 foot area. Once the thistles were cleared by a double rate of Milestone there were several Zizias rising from the ashes like a phoenix, soon to bloom and thrive. In the end, there was actually quite a lot of grass cowering underneath the thistles which filled in, and after a second year some of the other more tolerant wildflowers came back, but I am very fond of golden alexanders now, as they somewhat vindicated my “bigger hammer” strategy. In the long run they will likely be outcompeted in all but the mesic soils, but for now they are a major component of most of the restoration.

47. Heart-leaved golden alexander (Zizia aptera) Very similar, but adapted to somewhat drier conditions, the heart-leaved golden alexander is not found so far in my native prairie, though it wouldn’t be surprising to find one as I see them in other prairies in the neighborhood. I have some, though not a lot, in the restoration, so I am trying to spread more seed to establish a lasting population.

48. Leadplant (Amorpha canescens) This is another of my favorite species for several reasons. It is one of the plants my grandmother taught me about, calling it prairie tea, as her parents would brew tea from it when real tea wasn’t available. It is a legume broadly adapted to all but the most xeric and the very wettest sites, making it very valuable in the prairie. Leadplant is fairly tolerant of grazing, and will survive in any moderately grazed pasture. Though it is a small shrub, unlike most shrubs it loves fire, vigorously re-growing from underground buds even as woody topgrowth may be killed. And, though the flowers aren’t large, they are eye catching up close, with bright yellow-orange stamens sticking out from the violet petals. I have thousands in my prairies, and probably a thousand in the restoration, with more showing up every year. Like many legumes, the seedcoat is hard and may take several years to wear away to let the seed inside germinate. Four years ago I didn’t see any leadplant in the restoration, two years after spreading many pounds that I had gathered the previous two years, and was extremely disappointed. Three years ago I saw the first few. Two years ago I was ecstatic to see perhaps a couple hundred plants spread across a larger area. Then last year they were everywhere, even in some areas that had been double seeded in the original seeding where it seemed there was no room for new plants. Better yet, with several years growth, and perhaps colonization by Rhizobia bacteria to bring in nitrogen, and some of the plants are attaining some size and blooming to set some seed. The picture below is one of those just beginning to bloom.

49 and 50. False Indigo (Amorpha fruiticosa) and Fragrant False Indigo (Amorpha nana) False indigo, A fruiticosa, is a close relative of leadplant that is a more substantial shrub, 4-8′ tall growing along drainages and around bodies of water. They do not mind wet feet for a while, though they are not a true wetland plant. As such, I have not tried to put them in the restoration, which has only a couple acres of appropriate habitat. I didn’t need to. There are many along the edge of a slough in the adjacent native pasture, and seeds were likely deposited by some deer who had browsed upon them, and now I have several along the draw that leads to that slough from the restoration. Amorpha nana, on the other hand, is an upland species, also closely related to leadplant. I have never found them in my native prairies, but I know they are in some nearby prairies, so I have spread a little seed, and will likely do more. So far I have found only one in the restoration, but hope for more. I hope to get some pictures next summer of both of these species to add to this post.

That’s it for now. I will do one more post this winter on the rest of the forbs in the prairies, and one on the grasses.