The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Echinacea angustifolia
Also called Kansas Snakeroot, Black Sampson, Black Sampson Echinacea, Black Samson Echinacea, Echinacea, Narrow Leaf Echinacea, Narrow Leaf Purple Coneflower
Echinacea angustifolia, the narrow-leaved purple coneflower, is a hardy North American prairie perennial with pink to purple daisy-like flowers that bloom in late spring to mid-summer. It thrives in full sun and well-drained soil, and tolerates dry conditions once established.
Echinacea angustifolia, the narrow-leaved purple coneflower or blacksamson echinacea, is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is native to North America, where it is widespread across much of the Great Plains of central Canada and the central United States, with additional populations in surrounding regions.
E. angustifolia is a perennial herb with spindle-shaped taproots that are often branched. The stems and leaves are moderately to densely hairy. The plant produces flower heads each at the end of a long peduncle. Each flower head contains 8–21 pink or purple ray florets plus 80–250 orange disc florets.
The wildflower gardening author Claude A. Barr regarded narrow-leaved purple coneflower as, "bold, spectacular, and beautiful." Though he did disagree with the common name, pointing out that it is more pink than purple in most cases. Though gravelly or stony soil is a preference of the plant in the wild, they survive in normal garden soil provided they are not crowded by other plants. Most often it is propagated by seed, but can also be grown from around 10 centimeter sections of taproot from younger plants. They are set upright under 2–3 centimeters of soil with controlled moisture to start new root and top growth.
Greater root density is observed in Echinacea angustifolia growing in higher latitude, in turn, producing a greater quantity of polyphenols and alkylamides available in the root extract.
Although it is used in herbal medicine there is mixed consensus that it is effective or safe for treating disease.
Echinacea angustifolia grows in the drier parts of the tallgrass prairie, the mixed grass prairie, and the shortgrass prairie in North America, in a range of soils from rocky to sandy-clay. It is recorded by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service PLANTS database (PLANTS) as growing in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Manitoba, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming. The FNA largely agrees with this, but do not record it in New York and PLANTS only records it in Monroe County, NY.
Smooth purple coneflower · Bush's purple coneflower · Eastern purple-coneflower · Purple coneflower
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Echinacea angustifolia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
