John Hart Asher was feeling low one day in early November, until he stepped outside into a commotion of busy wings. Dozens of butterflies—mostly queens and monarchs but also sulphurs, eastern commas, and common buckeyes—were congregating in his yard in East Austin. Asher’s mood lifted as he watched the insects fluttering in the golden light above a cloud of small, lavender-colored blossoms.
His Gregg’s mistflower (Conoclinium greggii) was performing just as he’d intended it to. In his work as an environmental designer, Asher (who also hosts PBS’s Central Texas Gardener show) often plants mistflowers next to walkways, where passersby can witness “explosions” of butterflies. “It’s a beautiful flower, but it’s one of these plants that, when it’s kickin’, it’s an experience,” he said.
The Gregg’s mistflower puts on a show from March through November. That makes it one of Texas’s longest-blooming wildflowers, and as welcome in traditional flower beds as it is in wilder-looking pocket prairies. Native to the seasonally flooded streambeds of the Trans-Pecos, in West Texas, the mistflower grows happily in gardens across the state, so long as it gets sun and good drainage. As with other members of the aster family, its “blooms” are composite inflorescences made up of many tiny flowers. They grow like tiny purple pincushions in umbels (umbrella-shaped clusters) that are only about an inch and a half in diameter.
A few years ago, when my highest ideal of beauty in the garden was a blousy rose, I never looked at mistflowers and thought, “Ooh, sexy.” But they’ve won me over with the cumulative, misty effect of their frillies, including all the life that flutters around them. The most reliable visitors to the Gregg’s mistflower are members of the Danaus genus, including queens—monarch look-alikes that are year-round residents across Texas—and monarchs themselves, which migrate through in the spring and fall. Moths and butterflies continue coming back to mistflowers. They keep at it even after the blossoms have gone brown, so they aren’t just hitting the plants for nectar.
So why do butterflies go gaga for the mistflower? This plant may give them a crucial reproductive advantage. Addison Singleton, a graduate research assistant at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, who is studying how drought affects pollinators’ relationships with some common landscape plants, told me the queens are after a compound called intermedine, found in the plant’s tissues. Intermedine is a pyrrolizidine alkaloid, or PA, a type of toxin that’s essential for some creatures and harmful or unpalatable to others. Queen males scratch flowers’ nectar glands with their proboscises to stir up and absorb the stuff, Singleton explained. They might also absorb it through their feet. However they can get it, they need intermedine the way some humans want Viagra; it turns into a pheromone that stimulates females to mate with them. Without it, a guy queen is out of luck with the ladies.
Monarchs hit on the Gregg’s mistflower for other reasons as well, though these aren’t fully understood. Researchers believe they may be utilizing the spent flowers as pharmacies, “to help them fight against whatever they’re dealing with,” Singleton said—perhaps to defend their offspring from protozoan parasites that cause lethal defects. Other butterflies, as well as moths and bees, visit for the nectar, and several kinds of moths use the Gregg’s mistflower as a larval host. The plant always rewards close inspection, even when you think it’s done for the year.
Singleton can’t resist the Gregg’s mistflower, either. On her research plot in Stephenville, “it’s a banger of a plant” that attracts more butterflies than any of her other test subjects and laughs off drought, she said—even the most withering drought. She calls it a “gateway plant to getting involved with pollinators . . . because everybody loves butterflies,” and also because mistflowers disperse by rhizomes that spread quickly but are easy to pull up, divide, and share.
The stems of the Gregg’s mistflower top out at about two feet tall, and they tend to flop. Some staggered pruning discourages that and brings more flowers, making the plants a better nectar source, said Andrea DeLong-Amaya, director of horticulture at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, in Austin. They won’t flop or bloom as much in dry conditions.
Conoclinium greggii is named for Josiah Gregg (1806–1850), a frontiersman who traveled Texas and the West. Gregg sent at least 89 Southwestern plant specimens back East to the country’s leading botanists. The Wildflower Center’s database lists more than twenty species named in his honor, including Gregg salvia, Gregg acacia, Gregg dalea, and the desert plant Ceanothus greggii. Gregg was known during his lifetime for writing Commerce of the Prairies, an important account of the people, cultures, landscapes, and natural history he encountered across what is now Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s. He worked as a trader along the Santa Fe Trail during those years, also plotting maps and serving as an interpreter and guide during the Mexican-American War. In her 1994 book, A Wild Flower by Any Other Name, author Karen Nilsson describes Gregg as a loner and “a temperate and serious soul” who “came across as a pesky, intellectual crank” to fellow travelers. He died in 1850 near the end of a disastrous winter expedition to California’s Humboldt Bay.
Texas has other native mistflowers that adapt well to gardens, too. They’re all big pollinator magnets, with similar flowers to those of the Gregg’s but shorter blooming seasons. Like the Gregg’s, they’re generally happy with some sun and good drainage. Mistflower nomenclature is more tangled than a mess of vines in the Big Thicket, involving a jumble of genera and too many overlapping common names, but if you know some basics, the different species are easy to identify.
A mistflower South Texans call crucita (Chromolaena odorata) far outpaces the Gregg’s as the leading butterfly crack at the National Butterfly Center, in the Rio Grande Valley community of Mission. Stephanie Lopez, the center’s interim director, told me the plant attracts up to 62 species during its bloom time, which lasts from August through December. A leggy tropical and subtropical species that prefers dry soils, it can stretch to six feet tall. It dies back during hard freezes but can be evergreen in far South Texas. In Austin, DeLong-Amaya cuts it back in late winter or spring.
Gardeners with wetter conditions might want to look for Conoclinium coelestinum, a blue mistflower that grows naturally along woodland edges, stream banks, and ditches. It reaches about three feet in height, with triangular leaves that are a rich green. It dies back during hard winters but returns in the spring.
Ageratina havanensis is the mildest-mannered of this bunch, since it doesn’t spread by rhizomes. A deciduous, rounded shrub with white or light pink flowers in spring and fall, it’s endemic to the rocky hills and bluffs in the southern half of the Hill Country. Cut it back hard in early spring to encourage more flowers. It’s wildly attractive to bees, moths, beneficial wasps, and even hummingbirds.
Mistflowers generally pair well with other fall bloomers of similar size and contrasting colors. In my front yard in Brenham, the Gregg’s mistflower is looking good this fall alongside the bright yellow blossoms and blue-green leaves of huisache daisies (Amblyolepis setigera) and the feathery fuschia spikes of Gulf muhlys (Muhlenbergia capillaris). I cut it back during the winter so it will mingle with spring wine-cups that creep into it before the stems get tall. I keep A. havanensis just outside the window where I write, next to a tangerine-colored Esperanza and purple-spiked salvia leucantha that feed hummers, bees, and beneficial wasps. DeLong-Amaya suggests pairing the shrub with a big, cream-plumed Lindheimer muhly (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri), bringing in a different texture with more winter interest and habitat.
Whatever the point of the compound mistflowers provide to their pollinators, Asher is right about the powerful human experience the plants generate. Winter may finally arrive this week, and already, I’m looking forward to spring.
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