Field Guide

Fire pink is a low, clump-forming perennial with many slender, spreading stems that are sticky from glandular hairs, with open clusters of bright red flowers. This showy native Missouri plant is growing in popularity among home gardeners.

Pencil flower is small and often overlooked. It has wiry stems, long, bristly hairs, three-parted leaves, and orangish-yellow flowers.

Pinesap is a plant that puts the "wild" in wildflower! It lacks chlorophyll, so its roots connect to fungi underground and absorb nutrients from the fungi.

The flowers of purple milkweed are pale purple to reddish purple to dark purple, with greenish or red tints. The scientific name means “becoming purple”: The flowers start off rather pale and become more intensely purplish as they mature.

Deptford pink has straight, strong, narrow stems that bear small clusters of pink flowers with white dots. Common statewide in sunny, open locations such as pastures and roadsides.

This native lily looks a lot like the Asian “tiger lily” that is commonly cultivated in gardens. Michigan lily, however, has leaves mostly in whorls and lacks the round “bulblets” that tiger lily forms in its leaf axils.

Blackberry lily has leaves like an iris, flowers like an Asian lily, and seeds that look like blackberries! Introduced as an ornamental, this self-seeding member of the iris family occurs on bluffs, roadsides, and old homesites.

Native to much of eastern North America, eastern red columbine's range almost matches the breeding territory of the ruby-throated hummingbird, its number-one pollinator. Its bloom time matches the hummingbird's northward migration, too.

A spectacular plant of the tallgrass prairie, royal catchfly is threatened by habitat destruction and degradation throughout its range. Missouri has most of the world's populations of this noble plant.

Butterfly weed, a type of milkweed, is a favorite nectar plant for butterflies, and the leaves are eaten by monarch caterpillars. One of our showiest native wildflowers, butterfly weed is also a favorite of gardeners.