Sounds like Flax. Here is a link that might be useful: Flax

A wee bit off topic but twice Queen of the Praries was mentioned. Can anyone confirm what the leaves look like? Pot plants by chance? A client gave me some the other day but called it Queen of the plains. I googled of course and came up with nothing. She also called it Randyplay. Or that was how the English accent made it sound. A friend of hers brought a root back many years ago from France. she did show me a picture. Tall fluffy pink plume of flowers. My very technical perennial book does not use common names (nor pernunciation!) and it is the closest I can find to the match the picture If anyone can confirm that the leaves follow this description then I will know if I identified it correctly. I could also snap a pic. Tall fluffy plants: Plume poppy. Dana

All of the site preparation info above is good. Do it. Get rid of everything with Roundup (or any glyphosate herbicide). Then, next fall, in Nov or Dec, after the ground has cooled and nothing will germinate, spread an appropriate mixture of native grasses and forbs ("wildflowers") on the site. Let the winter rains and frosts work these into the ground (unless its sloped). The problem (as IÂve mentioned in several previous posts some time ago) is that "widlflowers" are never, ever found by themselves in nature. In every meadow example there are supporting and weed-suppressing grasses surrounding each forb. The reason your patch looked so bad was because it was a weed haven. If you can, at any time, look down and see bare soil (as you could when the flowers were there), weeds will take over the site. Consequently, youÂve got to plant proper grasses along with the flowers. And you need to plant a lot more grasses than forbs. You have a quarter-acre site, and I strongly recommend the planting of the grass below at a 10-15 lb/acre rate. ThatÂs about 4 lbs. The forbs are secondary and can be planted in ounce-sized quantities. But the key to accomplishing all that you wish is the proper selection, planting, and management of the supporting grasses. And there is really (in my experience  and IÂve done a lot of these professionally) only one grass to consider, little bluestem. It will provide all that you want: support for forbs, no requirement for water, fertilizers, or sprays, is gorgeous in all seasons (especially fall and winter in a remarkable russet red), and if properly managed, will persist until the next glacier gets here. The variety of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) to use is ÂBlaze. A number of Midwest native grass suppliers have it. I recommend Ohio Prairie Nursery (http://www.ohioprairienursery.com/). They can supply this variety. Spread the seed, mixed with sand, over a light snow in Nov or Dec. By this, you can see where this fluffy seed lands. In spring and summer, simply mow the entire area at 3-4 inches. The little bluestem grows downward the first year or two, and is hardly visible (except to an experienced expert). This first-year mowing keeps any weeds from getting the upper hand. In the second year, mow again in May and June, but then back off and let the little prairie grasses begin to shoot up. You will see very little and believe that youÂve wasted your time and money. But after Oct frosts you will see a scattering of reddish small clumps. In the third year, these will become nice clumps of grass of wonderfully thin leaves that toss nicely in the wind. The forbs will be growing between these little bluestem clumps. In the fourth year you will have what you envisioned, a "wildflower" meadow (not a garden  gardens require constant weeding, watering, and other continual messing -with) If you think you are planting a Midwestern prairie in New England, you are correct. But as it happens, most of the uplands surrounding what later became Boston was a little bluestem prairie meadow landscape in the early 1600s at the time of settlement. New Englanders erroniously believe that all of the region was ancestrally all in dense forest. Not so. Many large areas, especially near the Coast, were little bluestem prairies created by annual Native American landscape fires. The heath hen, a bird which became extinct on MarthaÂs Vineyard in the 1930s, was actually a New England version (same species, different subspecies) of the Midwestern prairie chicken. Unless you plant some native prairie grasses, you will not be able to accomplish all that you envision. The finest thing would be to attempt to restore this rare 16th century habitat.

Eupatorium serotinum