Field Guide

Wildflowers, Grasses and Other Nonwoody Plants

Showing 1 - 5 of 5 results
Photo of a spatterdock flower held against a leaf
Spatterdock (Yellow Pond Lily)
Nuphar advena (formerly N. lutea)
Spatterdock is a native aquatic plant with deep yellow, saucer-or globe-shaped flowers to 3 inches across. It grows in ponds, lakes, and slow-moving to stagnant portions of streams, rivers, and spring branches.
Photo of various duckweeds and watermeal on water surface
Duckweeds (Watermeal)
Lemna spp.; Spirodella spp.; Wolffia spp.
Duckweeds are the smallest of the flowering plants. They consist of tiny, green, round, leaflike bodies that float on the water’s surface. They are an important food for waterfowl.
Photo of pokeweed plant with dangling stalks of ripe and unripe berries.
Pokeweed
Phytolacca americana
A tall, smooth, branching plant with red stems and juicy, dark purple berries, pokeweed is both toxic and a traditional edible potherb called poke salat. It is common statewide.
Photo of climbing false buckwheat vines, leaves, and flowers.
Climbing False Buckwheat (Crested Buckwheat)
Fallopia scandens (formerly Polygonum scandens)
Climbing false buckwheat is a rampant, native, annual or perennial climber that often forms curtainlike masses of twining red stems, covering shrubs and trees. Look for it in moist, open or shaded bottomlands, alluvial valleys, and floodplains.
Rope dodder stems
Dodders
Cuscuta spp.
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.
See Also

About Wildflowers, Grasses and Other Nonwoody Plants in Missouri

A very simple way of thinking about the green world is to divide the vascular plants into two groups: woody and nonwoody (or herbaceous). But this is an artificial division; many plant families include some species that are woody and some that are not. The diversity of nonwoody vascular plants is staggering! Think of all the ferns, grasses, sedges, lilies, peas, sunflowers, nightshades, milkweeds, mustards, mints, and mallows — weeds and wildflowers — and many more!