Liatris squarrulosaMichx.

Appalachian blazing star

WFO wfo-0000058499 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Liatris squarrulosa, photographed by John Kees
fig. a John Kees, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-02 / obs. 193964898

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 13 botanical countries

Regions where Liatris squarrulosa is native: Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia AlabamaGeorgiaIllinoisIndianaKentuckyLouisianaMississippiMissouriNorth CarolinaSouth CarolinaTennesseeTexasWest Virginia
Native distribution of Liatris squarrulosa, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Georgia GEO
Illinois ILL
Indiana INI
Kentucky KTY
Louisiana LOU
Mississippi MSI
Missouri MSO
North Carolina NCA
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX
West Virginia WVA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 150 in flower of 191 examined

Proportion of examined Liatris squarrulosa in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 1 too few examined
Apr 0 1 too few examined
May 0 4 too few examined
Jun 0 8 0% 0% to 32%
Jul 0 3 too few examined
Aug 6 14 43% 21% to 67%
Sep 71 82 87% 78% to 92%
Oct 64 68 94% 86% to 98%
Nov 9 10 90% 60% to 98%
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Liatris squarrulosa observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 150 of 191 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 926 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -2.6 °C 0.8 °C 5.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.5 °C 31.7 °C 33.5 °C
Annual rainfall 1,152 mm 1,370 mm 1,613 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 241 mm 272 mm 336 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 926 research-grade observations of Liatris squarrulosa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 11 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Lacinaria earlei Greene
  • Lacinaria ruthii Alexander
  • Lacinaria scabra Greene
  • Lacinaria scariosa var. squarrulosa (Michx.) Small & Vail
  • Lacinaria shortii Alexander
  • Lacinaria tracyi Alexander
  • Liatris earlei K.Schum.
  • Liatris earlei (Greene) Schumann
  • Liatris scabra K.Schum.
  • Liatris scabra (Greene) Schumann
  • Liatris scariosa var. squarrulosa (Michx.) A.Gray

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.