There are four varieties of Gayfeather wildflowers that occur in Kansas. I have only seen three of the varieties and are shown below. The county workers keep mowing, slashing, and burning so finding wildflowers can be a task.

The tallest is the Thick Spiked Gayfeather which gets up to about five feet tall. They supposedly occur in the eastern half of Kansas but this is the only one I have ever seen. Pretty rare around here.

They bloom from the top down so these are about half done blooming.









These are Dotted Gayfeathers. They can look a bit different from one plant to another but they are all from eighteen inches to two feet tall and generally grow in a bunch of four to twenty stems. They are quite beautiful and this is their peak time of blooming. Not exactly rare but not on every corner either. Too much mowing by you know who.









These are Tall Gayfeathers. They appear to mostly grow as individual, single stemmed plants and get up to about four feet tall. They are also called Button Gayfeathers because their buds right before blooming supposedly look like buttons, at least the old-fashioned round, spherical buttons. They supposedly are wide spread but I have only seen them in two different small locations.

Grandma called them Blazing Star. She claimed that you could treat snakebites with ground up roots of them. No one I knew ever tried it.

Yep, they are called that and button snakeroot, and all sorts of other names I guess.

All these wildflowers are claimed to have been used by "native Americans" for every ailment known to man, but I never have read anywhere whether it ever actually cured any Indian.