Coneflower

Where it grows

Purple coneflower is a tallgrass-prairie native, growing wild in moist meadows and woodland edges from Iowa east to Virginia and south to Louisiana. It tolerates heavy clay, summer drought, and harsh winters down to minus thirty degrees Celsius, making it one of the most adaptable perennial flowers in cultivation.

How to recognise it

An upright, clump-forming plant sixty to a hundred and twenty centimetres tall with rough, lance-shaped leaves and stout flower stems. The composite head has a raised, spiky central cone of orange-brown disc florets surrounded by a ring of drooping pink-purple rays. Modern cultivars come in oranges, reds, and doubles.

Garden & cultural uses

Echinacea preparations, taken to shorten or prevent colds, generate a market measured in hundreds of millions of dollars annually; clinical evidence remains mixed. In the garden the seedheads stand through winter, feeding goldfinches and providing structure in frosty borders.

In ethnobotany

The Plains peoples of North America used Echinacea root for snakebite, toothache, and burns long before European settlement, knowledge that was carried into nineteenth-century American patent medicine.