Field Guide

Two-colored flowers of pink and light yellow make goat's rue easy to identify. Look for this legume in rocky, open woods, savannas, prairies, glades, and fields.

White wild indigo is the tallest species of false indigo in Missouri. It has a robust, striking presence, with white flowers and a shrubby look. Look for it statewide, in prairies and glades and along roadsides, streams, and valleys.

Long-bracted wild indigo flowers April–June, while the surrounding vegetation is still short. Its racemes of creamy-white pea flowers mature into oval pods with tapering beaks.

Everlasting pea is an old-fashioned garden plant your grandma might have grown on a fence. Native to the Old World, it often persists at old homesites.

A common component of high-quality upland prairie, American feverfew, or wild quinine, is a native wildflower that was used to treat fevers or malaria. It's in the composite family.

Indian physic, or American ipecac, is a leafy plant that can cover entire hills in the Ozarks. Native Americans used it as an emetic for internal cleansing, a widespread ceremonial custom.

False garlic looks like a wild garlic or onion plant, but it doesn’t smell like one. The flowers can be white, yellowish, or greenish, and they appear in spring and sometimes also fall.

Plainleaf pussytoes, named for its fuzzy flower heads, is one of the few flowering plants in Missouri that grows well in dry and shaded areas. It’s also an indicator of acid soils.

At first glance, you might overlook corn salad, except for the large colonies it often forms. The young leaves can be eaten as a salad green, hence the name.

Common in almost any kind of moist, wet or muddy habitat, fog fruit bears interesting round, purple flower heads that are ringed by small, white or pinkish flowers.