Gay-Feather

I love using books to identify plants and animals.
I found this beautiful road-side flower - it's purple, which is one of my favorite flower colors (I also like orange, but not together in bouquets), with fine messy petals. It took less than five minutes to scan a 250 page wildflower book and verify online. Granted, sometimes the books don't help, but most of the time they do and most of the time it's quick. I do have to say one thing in favor of online plant identification: you'll find more information than you need, you may even learn to identify a species you haven't even encountered yet. Now that that is out of the way... onto the plant.

Blazing Stars, or Gay-Feathers as they are also known, grow pretty much everywhere in the US that lies to the East of the Rockies. There are different variants and species, but most of them look similar enough that it's easy enough to figure out once you've seen one. Sometimes the flowers look more separate poofs, sometimes you can see the petals, and sometimes you can't.
This particular one you can barely see the petals for the (don't know what they actually are) purple tentacles coming out of the flowers. They grow in a 1-4 foot spike and the flowers bloom from the top down. The flowers are 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch and the thin leaves poking out the sides are up to 3 inches long.
They usually bloom late Spring through Late Summer, but since this is Texas heat and a Texan plant and apparently they can bloom here until early December.