Addisonia 67 



(Plate 114) 

 ECHINACEA PURPUREA 



Purple Cone-flower 



Native of central and south-central United States 

 Family Carduaceae Thistle Family 



Rudbeckia purpurea L. Sp. PI. 907. 1753. 



Echinacea purpurea Moench, Meth. 591. 1794. 



Brauneria purpurea Britton, Mem. Torrey Club 5: 334. 1894. 



A stout, erect, perennial herb, three to five feet high. The 

 stem is either smooth or rough, and frequently tinged with red; 

 it may be unbranehed, bearing a single flower-head at its summit, 

 but in favorable situations branches appear from the axils of the 

 upper leaves, producing a bushy plant with a spread of two feet. 

 The leaves are alternate, with petioles one to three inches long, 

 the blades triangular-ovate and rather firm in texture. While the 

 largest leaf-blades are four to six inches long by half as wide, the 

 upper are gradually reduced in size, are narrower in relative width, 

 and have shorter petioles; they are rough on both sides, three- 

 nerved, sharply and irregularly serrate at the margin, sharply 

 acuminate at the apex, and rather abruptly narrowed into an obtuse 

 or broadly acute base. The upper portion of the main stem, six 

 to ten inches in length, and of each of its branches, is leafless, 

 becomes gradually thicker toward the summit, and terminates in a 

 flower-head. Each head is subtended by a saucer-shaped or de- 

 pressed-hemispheric involucre composed of a number of lanceolate 

 scales. The disk is an inch or more in diameter, purple-brown, and 

 hemispheric or conic. The disk-flowers are almost concealed among 

 the long sharp-pointed projecting scales of the receptacle. The 

 ray-flowers are twelve to twenty in number, red-purple, two to two 

 and one half inches long, and conspicuously drooping. The ray- 

 flowers are neutral, and fall after flowering, while each disk-flower 

 ripens a thick four-sided achene with a short crown-like pappus. 



The purple cone-flower is distinctly a woodland species and is 

 widely distributed through the forested region of the central states 

 from Pennsylvania to Michigan, Georgia, and I^ouisiana. West of 

 this region, it is replaced by Echinacea pallida in the prairie region, 

 and by Echinacea angustifolia on the plains; Echinacea tennesseensis 

 occurs in Tennessee and Arkansas. These three agree with Echin- 

 acea purpurea in their red-purple flowers, while the fifth species of 

 the genus, Echinacea paradoxa of southwestern Missouri, has 

 yellow rays. 



Of the four species with red-purple flowers, Echinacea purpurea 

 is by far the most attractive in its native haunts and most worthy 



