Ecosystem restoration in progress

PRAIRIE BLAZING STAR Liatris pycnostachya
The above picture is what ecosystem restoration is all about: the rescue of our vanishing biodiversity. What a payback to see that actually unfold over the years—biodiversity increases before your eyes!

Prairie Blazing Star is a member of the Sunflower family and also the tallgrass prairie. It’s a perennial corm (bulb) plant and is an important contributor to its ecosystem as all the blazing stars are excellent nectar producing species for insects and humming birds. Bees and wasps, and many others, love it. The butterfly in this picture is a Silver-Spotted Skipper. It’s only one of numerous great butterfly species that visit these plants.
  
Since it’s a plant that isn’t tightly lodged in the ground I have to be very careful in the winter when I strip the seeds that I don’t pull up the plant—defeats the purpose, right? My granddaughter Tullie and I gathered seed from local specimens within the range of our ecotype. We gathered the seed from neighboring off-site locations because Wafer Creek Ranch (WCR) had none remaining in its own seed/bud bank from the old days when it would have flourished in its own tallgrass prairie ground cover within the shortleaf pine-oak-hickory woodland. Over the years of gathering the seed from the plants on WCR and redistributing them, there are now many more plants on WCR.

Next to the plant in this image you will see the tall culms of Little Bluestem Grass, the flagship species of almost all tallgrass prairie systems.

Check out the wiki link for more info about this species growing on Wafer Creek Ranch (WCR). JA

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About the Author
Conservationist and retired medical doctor (pathology), Johnny Armstrong and his wife Karen and Opal (k-nine) live within a Nature Conservancy protected old-growth forest and woodland near Ruston, Louisiana. Shadowshine is his first novel.