Field Guide

Yellow star grass grows throughout the tallgrass prairie region. Imagine the thoughts of pioneers when they gazed upon these bright little lilies during stops along their westward journey!

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.

Pondweeds are rooted aquatic plants with underwater leaves on long, flexible, jointed stems. Some have floating leaves, too, that are differently shaped. Missouri has about 10 species in the pondweed genus.

These aquatic algae look like regular vascular plants. Chara has a crisp, gritty texture, a musky odor, and gray-green, needlelike structures that resemble leaves.

Naiads are slender, narrow-leaved plants that grow completely under water and are rooted to the bottom. They never have broad, floating leaves or conspicuous flowers or seed heads.

Coontail, a common submerged aquatic plant, got its name from the crowded upper leaves, which make the stem tip appear bushy like the tail of a raccoon.

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.

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.

“It’s an odd plant,” this rattlesnake master, “with its leaves like yucca, a head like a thistle, and second cousin to the carrot.” That’s how the great prairie writer John Madson summed it up!

False aloe is one of the few native Missouri plants related to the agaves, or century plants, of the Southwest. Unlike agaves, a false aloe rosette can bloom and rebloom, and it doesn’t die after sending up a flowering stalk.