Moist prairies and relics of such habitat along roadsides and railroads.

This species may have been a characteristic species of of lakeplain prairie openings in the southeastern Lower Peninsula and was apparently absent from the true prairies of southwestern Michigan. These eastern occurrences are somewhat disjunct from the main range of the species from Wisconsin and western Indiana west into the tall grass prairie region, a sitiuation somewhat reminiscent of that of Lithospermum incisum.