Field Guide

Red clover, or purple clover, is the familiar large, pinkish-purple clover that grows in lawns, pastures, and roadsides statewide. A Eurasian native, it was introduced to North America by the middle 1600s.

The handsome violet-blue flower spikes of pickerel weed stand out vividly at the edges of ponds. One of our few blue-flowering pond plants, pickerel weed is easy to identify by its color alone.

Lamb’s quarters won’t win any beauty contests for its flowers, but it merits an award for being both a common garden weed as well as a nutritious leafy green valued around the world.

Purslane can be an aggressive pest in gardens and is one of the worst agricultural weeds in the world. Meanwhile, it’s also a favorite wild vegetable served cooked or raw, and many people cultivate it.

Bur cucumber is a nonwoody, annual vine common in low, moist soils. It can spread across an area 20 feet wide, covering the ground and nearby shrubs. Note its lobed, gourd-family leaves, curly green tendrils, clusters of prickly, green, oval fruits, and 5-lobed, cream-colored flowers.

Common chickweed, native to Europe, has been introduced nearly worldwide and is a familiar garden weed in Missouri. It forms spreading mats on the ground and has small flowers with 5 petals, each deeply lobed making it look like 10.

Violets, as a group, are fairly easy to identify, with their colorful five-petaled “faces” so welcome in springtime. Missouri has 17 species, and some are confusingly similar. This page is introduces them as a group.

Missouri violet is one of five Missouri stemless violets with purple or blue flowers and unlobed leaves. It is distinguished by its triangular or heart-shaped leaves that are longer than wide and are coarsely toothed only on the basal two-thirds.

The leaf blades of cleft violet are highly variable, and the plant produces differently shaped leaves as the season progresses. Midseason leaves have a broad central lobe flanked by additional lobes toward the base.

Pale violet, or cream violet, is Missouri’s only white-flowering violet that produces true aboveground stems. It is scattered to common in the Ozarks, Ozark border, and Bootheel lowlands and uncommon or absent elsewhere in the state.