Preferred Habitat - Open, sunny places, moist or dry.
Flowering Season - May-September.
Distribution - Western Ontario to Missouri and the Gulf States;
escaped from gardens in the East.
Glorious masses of this prolific bloomer persistently outshine
all rivals in the garden beds throughout the summer. Cut as many
slender-stalked flowers and buds as you will for vases indoors,
cut them by armfuls, and two more soon appear for every one
taken. From seeds scattered by the wind over a dry, sandy field
adjoining a Long Island garden one autumn, myriads of these
flowers swarmed like yellow butterflies the next season. Very
slight encouragement induces this coreopsis to run wild in the
East. Grandiflora, with pinnately parted narrow leaves and
similar flowers, a Southwestern species, is frequently a runaway.
Bees and flies, attracted by the showy neutral rays which are
borne solely for advertising purposes, unwittingly
cross-fertilize the heads as they crawl over the tiny, tubular,
perfect florets massed together in the central disk; for some of
these florets having the pollen pushed upward by hair brushes and
exposed for the visitor's benefit, while others have their sticky
style branches spread to receive any vitalizing dust brought to
them, it follows that quantities of vigorous seed must be set.
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