by Pat Armstrong

Indian Chief, Pride-of-Ohio, American Cowslip, Roosterheads, Birdbills, Johnny Jump, Shuttle Cocks. These are some of the picturesque common names for Dodecatheon meadia, known in these parts as the midland shooting star.

Dodecatheon comes from the Greek and means 12 gods. The name was first used by Pliny for the primrose, which was thought to be under the care of the 12 principal Greek gods. Linnaeus used it for the shooting star, a mostly North American flower in the primrose family. The species name refers to Richard Mead (1673-1754), an English doctor who botanized in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida in the early 1700s.

There are 30-50 species of shooting stars in the world, depending on who is doing the counting. At least one is from the arctic of northeastern Asia. Most are from western North America, often of arctic or alpine tundra. Dodecatheon meadia is the largest, growing up to two feet or more in height and having up to 30 flowers in its inflorescence. The leaves are up to three inches wide and eight or so inches long. A reddish patch at the base gradually narrows to a red stem. The leaves form a basal rosette and appear early in the spring. The naked flowering stalk is topped by a terminal umbel of drooping flowers that range from white to rose pink in color. There are five pointed anthers fused into a central point from which the five petals bend backwards so the flowers look like badminton shuttlecocks, comets, or shooting stars.

They are pollinated by bumblebees and bloom from mid-April through June when the leaves completely disappear. The seed capsules turn upright with their five sepals forming a star opening from which the multitude of tiny seeds shake out whenever the wind or passing animals nudge them.

Midland shooting star has the widest ecological amplitude of all the shooting stars and can be found temporarily underwater in soggy meadows or on bone-dry goat prairies. It grows in prairies, woods, oak savannas, rocky hillsides, and even in calcareous fens ranging from Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania westward to Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Texas, then eastward to Alabama and Georgia.

Shooting stars are truly ephemeral, lasting only five-to-eight weeks in early spring and disappearing by July except for their ripening seed pods. The following year's flower buds are produced by the end of the spring growing season and contractile roots draw them down into the soil to protect them from summer's heat and drought, trampling, and prairie fires.

Viable seeds scattered and raked into prairie soil after a fire take about six years to produce a plant big enough to notice. A few plants may flower by their seventh year.

The Village of Barrington, in a nod to native beauty, voted shooting star as its village flower.

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