Waiting for the first signs of spring and new growth on the priarie can be frustrating if you have spring fever, but just when you are ready to give up, these little 6-inch beauties pop up, usually in early to mid April, a week or more before any other spring prairie wildflowers make their first appearance. 

The blueish flowers often appear before the leaves do.  There are 5-7 petal-like sepals surrounding a center of yellow stamens.  The flower is about 1 1/2 inches tall.  The leaves are basal, palmate, and very hairy.  There are actually hairs all over the plant, even on the sepals. 

This memeber of the buttercup family has a beautiful flower, but equally stiking is the fluffy pappus that forms after the flower is done blooming.  The sepals fall off, and the styles elongate (up to 1 1/2 inches long).  Each style is attached to a seed, and it will blow off in a wind, spreading the seeds over the landscape.

Pasqueflowers prefer open, southern-facing rocky, sandy slopes.  They usually only bloom on sunny days, and can last from a week to several weeks, depending on the number of sunny days available to them in a given season.  This year (2011) they began blooming about April 16, and the entire next week was cool and cloudy, so the flowers did not progress much in a week.  They can be found on the ridge west of Riegel Overlook, as well as at James Road near Klotts Road. 

The Pasqueflower is named for it's timing, always around Easter-time (sometimes later, sometimes earler).  The word "Pasque" is an old French word for Easter, derived from the Greek "paskha" and Hebrew "pesakh" for Passover.

According to an eclectic physician cited by the Lloyds (1884-1885) this flower was used to quell sexual excitement in both men and women.  "I regard it as decidedly the best emmenagogue, when the suppression is not the result of, or attended by, irritation and determination of  blood; where there is simple suppression of atony or nervous shock, it may be used with confidence.  In male or female, it lessens sexual excitement.  It does not diminish sexual power, but rather strengthens it, by lessening morbid excitement".