Field Guide

Tall bellflower is an abundant native bellflower that is easily identified by its stout, tall habit, short, wheel-shaped, blue corolla, and the curved, purple style that projects beyond the flower.

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.

Blue cardinal flower, or blue lobelia, is a showy, late-blooming native wildflower that grows along streams, ditches, sloughs, and other wet places. It has blue or purple tubular flowers with 2 upper lips and 3 lower lips.

Clasping Venus' looking glass is a single-stemmed plant with purple or blue star-shaped flowers and bluntly toothed, alternate leaves that clasp the stem. It's scattered statewide in a variety of habitats and blooms May-June.

Indian hemp is a shrubby, upright perennial with opposite branches and milky sap. This native plant can be a troublesome weed in crop fields and gardens, but Native Americans used its tough, fibrous stems for rope-making.

There are several members of the aster family that look something like common dandelions. But unlike the familiar lawn weed, two-flowered Cynthia is a native Missouri wildflower.

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.

The brown, starlike, spreading flowers of climbing milkweed differ from those of other milkweeds, but milky sap, warty pods with silk-tasseled seeds, and the structures in the center of the flowers show its true alliance.

Common milkweed is famous as a food plant for monarch butterflies. It bears curious seedpods bearing seeds that fly on silky parachutes. It's common statewide in a variety of habitats.

A single-stalked perennial with white or pale blue flowers all along the top portion of the stem, spiked lobelia is most common in sunny or grassy habitats like prairies, old fields, forest openings, and glades.