Nature Near You: Wildflowers – The Secrets of Coneflowers Revealed

In this episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), Kim Baker shares her love-hate relationship with wildflowers and how the resilient coneflower won her over. From the prairies of Arkansas to her backyard rain garden, discover the fascinating history and medicinal uses of echinacea, a plant beloved by pollinators and people alike. Tune in to learn more about how this beautiful wildflower has been used for centuries, and how you can spot and appreciate wildflowers in your own neighborhood!

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you need to know about nature, and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Kim Baker, and it's miniseries time. For those of you just joining us, I'm filling in for a couple of weeks while Laura and Katie take a break and prepare for the next Footlawn season.
Throughout this miniseries, we're talking about nature near you, taking a closer look at the plants and animals right outside our front door. In today's episode, I thought I'd talk about my contentious relationship with flowers and how one type of wildflower, well, grew on me. Let's jump into it.
It probably doesn't come as a shock to know that as a kid, I hated chores. The worst of them all were summer chores, which largely took place outside and were, in my opinion, pointless. Regularly, my sister and I were voluntold to weed the flower beds or around the bushes on the side of the house.
Regularly, my sister would take one side of the plot and I would take the other. Regularly, my parents would comment on how thorough my sister was and how much better of a job she did for being four years younger than I was. And regularly, I was enraged.
Needless to say, plants and I didn't get off on the right foot, or root, I guess. Fast forward nearly 20 years, ew. And instead of meticulously pulling weeds, I'm standing in the middle of a prairie, mostly by choice, sweating through my shirt because it's 9 a.m.
in late May in southwestern Arkansas. My boss, who is literally a foot taller than I am, is giving me a tour of the natural area and quizzing me on wildflowers the whole way. What's this one, he'd ask?
I don't know, a yellow flower, I'd retort. He'd tell me the name, give me a description, and marched on while I scurried to keep up, vigorously scrawling half words and phrases onto my notepad. Eventually, we turned a corner to catch some shade at a welcome reprieve.
When I was done panting, I looked out across the rolling meadow to see hundreds upon hundreds of pale purple coneflowers facing the sun, petals appropriately drooping like one of those weeping willow fireworks, patiently waiting for pollination. I learned quite a bit about coneflowers that day, and they're pretty intriguing and useful plants. Echinacea is the name of the genus, and although there are 10 distinct naturally found species in Eastern and Central North America, horticulturalists have created many, many hybrids for gardens.
The name comes from the Greek for sea urchin, which alludes to the spiny central disc of the seeds. They're part of the daisy family, bloom in the summer, and are known for bulbous heads and showy flowers. If the word echinacea sounds familiar, you may have read it on throat lozenges or used as an ingredient in other items to relieve pain or cold symptoms.
And it's been around much longer than that package of Ricola. The indigenous people of North America used echinacea in traditional medicine. It's been documented as far back as the 18th century and used externally for insect bites, burns, and wounds.
Root chewing was used to ease throat and tooth infections. And it was also used internally for pain, coughing, snake bites, and cramps. Though I would argue maybe don't use it for snake bites and just go to the ER.
At least 15 groups used this plant in medicine, most widely used by the plains indigenous people in North America. In the late 1800s, European settlers caught on. First, it was marketed as Meyer's blood purifier, which was promoted for neuralgia, rattlesnake bites, and rheumatism.
And again, don't use this for snake bites, please. But by the 1930s in Germany and the 1950s in Switzerland, this was commercially produced. Knowing that, it will come as no surprise that in time it was the most common herbal remedy in the United States.
Plants still don't feel my cup like animals do, but that's okay. We're all attracted to different things in nature. Regardless, I'm still trying to learn more about them.
I've planted some coneflower varieties in my kinda sorta rain garden. They don't mind rain, and they're incredibly drought tolerant, which is great for living in central Arkansas. Plus, pollinators love them, and birds will eat the seeds after the blooms have fallen, hopefully giving me some more surprised coneflowers next year.
And when I'm on the trail or wandering around my neighborhood and I see a particularly cool flower, I take a photo and look it up on iNaturalist or with my color-coded wildflower book. I know, I'm a nerd, it's fine. If you want to learn more about how people use plants as an alternative or in conjunction with Western medicine, check out our Natural Remedies episode from season two.
And the next time you're outside, take a look at a would-be weed and see if it has other uses. Is it flowering? Is something pollinating it?
Is something eating it or hiding underneath? Let us know what you observe. All right, folks, that's all for this mini episode.
Until next time, bye.