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.

A true lettuce that can be eaten as a cooked or salad green, Florida lettuce has lavender to purplish blue flowers and grows statewide.

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.

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.

Often found on gravelly Ozark streamsides, shining blue star lifts its clusters of showy, light-blue flowers in late spring. A top choice for native wildflower gardening, it is interesting spring, summer, and fall.

A native wildflower of forests, blufftops, glades, pastures, and roadsides, beaked hawkweed looks something like a hairy, yellow-flowering chicory. It is found mostly south of the Missouri River.

Whorled milkweed has rounded clusters of small white flowers. The leaves are soft, threadlike, and grow in whorls from the stem. It occurs in upland prairies and fields.

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.

With widespread sprays of small white flowers, flowering spurge looks a lot like the "baby's breath" so popular with florists. Each little "flower" has 5 white false petals surrounding a cup of tiny yellow male flowers and a single female flower.