Liatris elegans
species of plant

Liatris elegans, known commonly as pinkscale gayfeather, pinkscale blazingstar, and elegant blazingstar, is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is native to the southeastern United States as far west as Texas and Oklahoma.
Description
Liatris elegans grows from rounded or turnip-shaped corms, that produce stems 30 to 120 centimeters tall. The upright growing stems generally have soft hairs but sometimes plants have coarse stiff hairs. The basal and cauline leaves have one nerve, and the leaves are long and thin, ranging from 6 to 20+ centimeters long and 3 to 8 millimeters wide. The foliage is mostly hairless but may have some soft hairs, and it is gland-dotted. The leaves are gradually reduced in size as they ascend the stem or abruptly reduced near the middle of the stem; the basal and lower stem leaves typically wither away before flowering. The flowers are in heads with 4 or 5 florets and maybe pink, purplish, white, or yellow in color. The heads are produced in densely packed spike-like terminal inflorescences. The seed are produced in cypselae fruits that are 3.5 to 5 millimeters long with feathery bristles.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Liatris elegans” as species of plant. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of plant. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 5, 2022. The linked authority identifier is Q6540310. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Liatris elegans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.