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.

Many Missouri children learn about this orange-flowered native plant by playing with the juicy green seedpods, which, when ripe, "explode" upon the slightest touch. This is jewelweed's mechanism for seed dispersal, and it's the reason for the name "touch-me-not."

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.

Native to Europe and Asia, orange day lily was widely planted by early settlers and has become widely naturalized in North America. The seeds don't mature in Missouri, so all the plants here are spread by root divisions.

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.

The scarlet pimpernel, a native of Europe, is a tender annual with scarlet or brick-red flowers that close around 4 p.m., or whenever clouds shade the sun. When the sun comes out again, they reopen.

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.

Cardinal flower provides a splash of bright red along streams and rivers, in bottomland forests, in ditches by roads, and in other wet places. It's a long-blooming Missouri native wildflower.