I wrote about amazing frost flowers in Missouri Gardener. Just click Have you ever seen a frost flower?
I suspect they are the work of garden fairies out visiting their friends and family, the woodland fairies.
Yellow ironweed (Verbesina alternifolia) and white crownbeard (Verbesina virginica) can create frost flowers. White crownbeard is known as frost beard.
You have to get up pretty early in the morning to see frost flowers.
They amaze me. When neighbor Bill told me about them, I thought he was pulling my leg. So he went out, armed with a camera along with his deer hunting buddies. He came back with photos to prove they exist. I’ve never seen one. You can only find them in that precarious season between fall and winter.
Delicate and light, I have friends who said she ate them when she was a kid during the Great Depression.
Scout out the area while you can still identify the green plant known as ironweed (Verbesina alternifolia)
It happens when there is a freeze, but before the ground freezes.
It’s not likely that I will ever see one, as soon as the sun touches them, they vanish. And, I’m not real sure I want to be out in the Missouri woods during deer hunting season. Deer Season is an event in Southeast Missouri, just about as big as Thanksgiving.
