Occasional fires seem to greatly improve growing conditions for prairie crocus, by boosting the supply of nutrients and sunlight when dry grass cover is removed. Anemone patens grows very well in a grazed habitat. The deep roots of the plant live for many years and are not seriously affected by animal hooves. It contains a poisonous alkaloid, an irritant that can cause inflammation and blistering. This irritant can be a problem to domestic sheep when they eat the flowers, but it seems to be ignored by deer, elk and ground squirrels, which eat the prairie crocus in the early spring.
Prairie crocus does well in grazed areas, but fields that are ploughed are a different matter.
Prairie crocus is slow to return even to favourable sites after ploughing, perhaps because it needs the fungal partners that only occur in unploughed soils. In one case it took 40 years for prairie crocus to return to a small ploughed section of hilltop in eastern Alberta. The plant is also called pasque flower because in some areas it tends to bloom at Easter-time. The poisonous properties of the prairie crocus were used to advantage by First Nations Peoples. A poultice made from the plant was used as a counter-irritant to treat rheumatism or other muscular pains.