Field Guide

The small, cloverlike flowering heads and trifoliate leaves of black medick are clues that this plant is in the Fabaceae, the bean or pea family. An introduced, weedy species, it is closely related to alfalfa.

Wild strawberry is one of the parents of the cultivated strawberry and is one of our prized native wild edibles. It’s also a valuable food for innumerable animals, and it’s attractive in native wildflower gardens.

Bird’s-foot trefoil forms low patches of bright yellow flowers along roadsides, having been planted to stabilize soil after road construction. Up close, it clearly has pea flowers. The leaves are cloverlike, with two leafy stipules at the base of each.

A bushy native perennial legume with small clusters of pink flowers, slender bush clover provides nectar for numerous insects. Several types of birds eat the seeds, and many mammals eat the foliage.

Leaf cup is named for the leafy appendages that wrap around the stem at the bases of the opposite leaves. Part of the sunflower family, leaf cup has about 8 white ray florets surrounding yellow disk florets.

Found mainly in the southern half of the state, in prairies and glades, prairie parsley is an upright, stout-stemmed perennial with small yellow flowers in umbrella-shaped clusters. It blooms April through June.

One of our more challenging plants to identify, meadow parsnip looks an awful lot like golden Alexanders. But you can do it! Look closely at the flower clusters and at the edges of the leaves, and then check the seeds.

Named for its resemblance to a European herb that was popular in Medieval times, golden Alexanders is a native Missouri wildflower with bright yellow flowers arranged in umbrella-like clusters.

Queen Anne’s lace is many things to many people — roadside wildflower, noxious introduced weed, wild edible, medicinal herb, delightful cut flower. In Missouri, it blooms May through October.

Missouri has two species of sweet cicely, which can be hard to tell apart. Both have umbels of small white flowers, fernlike leaves, and sweetly aromatic, carrotlike roots.