Meadow Blazingstar Seeds (Liatris ligulistylis)

“Some decades ago, back when I worked extensively across the U.S. for Xerces, I used to spend long, languid summer days driving around, checking in on prairie plantings in far flung places…the Dakotas, the Ozarks, sleepy corn communities in Indiana. In those travels it began to creep into my mind that I was seeing a lot of monarchs on the meadow blazingstar.

I was no stranger to most of the widespread blazingstar species, having spent years earlier managing tallgrass prairie seed crops as a freelance crop consultant. All of them attract monarchs, but something different was going on with the meadow blazingstar (Liatris ligulistylis). The monarchs were more numerous, more active with this particular species, almost feverishly so. 

This thought parked itself in my head, and lingered there.

Some time later, I contracted with my friend Keith in Minnesota to plant a seed production plot of this plant. Keith was (and still is) a longtime experienced and excellent grower of other blazingstar species. He planted the new -- and small -- plot of meadow blazingstar, adjacent to a much larger field of the taller, showier, more prolific prairie blazingstar (Liatris pychnostachya). 

 For a season our crop of meadow blazingstar grew. It was scraggly and unhealthy. A bunch of plants died. They didn’t like the soil. The survivors produced pathetic, shabby Dr. Suess flowers, a weak version of what the plant could potentially be under better growing conditions. Still, the monarchs came. And in coming they consistently flew over and through the glorious, tall, healthy, prolifically flowering, nectar-rich prairie blazingstar, to alight and fly in dizzying circles on and around the few small rows of sad looking meadow blazingstar.

It was uncanny. 

Keith made the offhand comment to me one day that, while he couldn't he couldn’t explain it, he felt like the monarchs were coming from a long way off specifically for these flowers. 

I had the same haunting feeling.

 Later, the meadow blazingstar was harvested, and the seed heads stored in a drying cart to ripen. The monarchs still came, clustering to the cart. When the seed was threshed and run through the air screen cleaner – blasting dust and chaff away and sieving out the good seed – the monarchs still came, seemingly attracted to the dried fragments and flower remnants of the cleaning process. 

 This experience turned out to be beautiful and disquieting to me. Like a dream, something unreal, a direct conversation with the Divine.

 Years ticked by.

I eventually made a brief note of this plant’s power to attract monarchs in Xerces’ 100 Plants to Feed the Monarch book. I told a few colleagues about these experiences. When they looked, they saw the same thing: a single meadow blazingstar inflorescence can often attract more monarchs than hundreds of other immediately surrounding prairie plants. 

For sometime I thought the meadow blazingstar might be spoofing the monarchs – perhaps mimicking butterfly sex pheromones to attract them as pollinators. But with a little observation, that theory didn’t seem to make sense. Both male and female monarchs are seemingly attracted in roughly the same ratio. 

And yet something unusual is happening here. Indeed, while the monarchs do nectar on the flowers of this plant, they also spend time just loafing on it, and even more confoundingly, fluttering around it without a clear intent – spending calories and time in some rapture only understood by themselves.” 

-Eric Lee-Mäder, 2026 

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Meadow blazingstar is native to the Upper Midwest, Northern Great Plains, and Rocky Mountains. It prefers well-drained soil, and needs full sun. This plant is also a favorite of beautiful soldier beetles.

Approximately 150-seeds (0.2 grams).