Happy Halloween to the Bleeding Heartland community! I don’t have any scary nature photos to share. Instead, to mark the holiday, this week’s featured Iowa wildflower is a mystery I haven’t been able to identify. I hope a native plants expert will be able to tell me which kind of blazing star (Liatris) it is. Some have suggested rough blazing star (Liatris aspera) or dotted blazing star (Liatris punctata). I thought rough blazing star looked more like these plants, but I’m not sure.

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

I took these pictures about four weeks ago near Gray’s Lake in Des Moines. Unfortunately, the resolution is not great, and I didn’t get back before the first frost to take a closer look at some of the plants’ features.

My hunch is that this isn’t rough blazing star, because I think the flowerheads on rough blazing star look more button-like, as in this picture: