Field Guide

Lamb’s quarters won’t win any beauty contests for its flowers, but it merits an award for being both a common garden weed as well as a nutritious leafy green valued around the world.

Dodders are easy to identify, even though at first you might not recognize them as plants. These parasitic plants usually look like a hairlike mass of yellow or orange, leafless, wiry, vining stems wrapping around the stems of other plants.

Curly dock’s rosettes of wavy-edged, leathery leaves are a common sight on roadsides and other disturbed lands. The fruit clusters at the top half of the plant turn dark rusty brown and are easy to spot from a distance.

Common cocklebur occurs statewide in open, disturbed, lowland habitats. It is a common weed in crop fields. It has wide, rough, coarsely toothed leaves; stout, often purple-speckled stems; and characteristic burs with hooked spines.

Switchgrass is a native perennial, warm-season, clump-forming mid or tall grass. In midsummer, delicate-looking, open, multiply-branching flowering clusters rise above the foliage.

A native of Europe, Timothy is a common cool-season pasture grass and occurs in a wide variety of open or disturbed habitats. It is one of the worst causes of hay fever in the late spring and early summer.

Virginia wild rye can be identified by its bristly seed heads, which are held erect and whose bristle-like awns stay straight. This is a common native perennial tuft-forming, cool-season midgrass usually reaching about 2–4 feet in height.

Round-headed bush clover is a stiffly upright plant that has rounded flower clusters with cream-colored, pea-shaped flowers with purple markings on the banner petal. It grows statewide in open habitats.

Bottlebrush grass is a native perennial, tuft-forming wild rye that typically grows in woodlands. The widely spaced spikelets spread away at a right angle from the main flowering stem.