I went by Home Depot today to look at their coneflowers they have on sale. What I saw really makes me think something is terribly wrong with the tissue culture process in Echinacea Plants... Ruby Star: Only one plant looks like the picture. All the rest had pale pink blooms with white towards the center. I did like the plants with the white, but can you believe they are calling these Ruby Star? Their tissue culture is clearly not working properly with this plant. Someone asked about Ruby Star just yesterday. I had no idea this plant was this bad. It's not in the Big Sky Series, but this plant should be recalled. It is not stable in tissue culture obviously. Sundown: I'm telling you these plants for sale are diseased. Some of the plants have petals missing and some are distorted. I believe these plants are infected with something. I found one plant that didn't have the same color orange blooms. They were paler. This is obviously something wrong in tissue culture but for blooms to have petals missing and not uniform something has to be wrong with these plants. They also had one other variety but the blooms weren't open. I'd suggest buying plants with more than one bloom open. This way you can make sure both have the same color and not distorted petals, but I swear these tissue cultured plants can develop problems I've never seen with the normally propagated plants. We really should all be more careful with what we plant in our gardens. I hate to be someone's guinea pig and end up paying them to test their mutants.

There is a lot of good information, If you google plants affected by asters yellow it will give you university sites. Good reliable information written in easily understood language. Many other of our garden plants, vegetables and crops are affected by aster yellows. Theirs no current effective control for the leaf hopper that spreads AY. Hope I say this right, all of the plants we grow are susceptible to viruses and deadly bacteria's. Some can be spread by our hands such as hosta virus x. Some spread by thrips,ect. The point I'm getting to is it could happen that your plants become infected and it may never happen. So relax there are worse viruses out there. For an eye opener google Wisconsin Pest Survey you'll see plants with viruses that you probably never heard of before. Doom and gloom is not my intent. It is that I love to garden and plant diseases or not I'll still garden. The best I can do is to recognize a sick plant as soon as I can and get rid of it ASAP!

It's hard to say for sure based on the photo. I copied a good description of the disease from the UW-Horticulture Extension website: Symptoms of aster yellows are often mistaken for damage due to herbicide exposure. Infected plants are typically stunted and twisted, with foliage that is yellow or red. Infected plants are often sterile. Floral parts that are normally brightly colored may remain green, and petals andsepals may become puckered and distorted. In purple coneflower, secondary flower heads (often in a cluster) may emerge from the primary flower head. Mine definitely had that secondary flower thing going on. I do not see that occurring on yours.

It certainly appears to be Asters Yellow, and it can be spread by cutting tools, as well as the leafhoppers that carry it from plant to plant. Remove any plants that show the signs of infection and keep your fingers crossed.