Field Guide

Eastern gama grass is a native perennial bunch grass with flowering stalks up to 8 feet tall. The fingerlike seed heads have separate male and female florets. The seed-bearing, female florets are in the lower portion of each spike. It occurs statewide and is an important component of native prairies and glades.

Sideoats grama is a native perennial clump-forming grass with flowering stalks 1–3 feet tall. The oatlike seeds dangle uniformly in two rows on one side of the flattened stalk. It occurs nearly statewide.

Horsetails, or scouring rushes, are in the genus Equisetum. They’re easy to recognize with their jointed, hollow stems. Like ferns, they reproduce via spores instead of flowers and seeds.

Ebony spleenwort is a common forest-floor fern with wiry, shiny, dark brown leaf stalks and a ladderlike series of dark green, narrowly oblong leaflets.

Purple cliff brake is a fern that grows from crevices in limestone and dolomite rocks, or in rocky soils near them. Its leathery, blue-gray leaflets, which are oval to lance-shaped, make the fronds seem not very fernlike.

Smooth cliff brake is almost always seen growing out of an exposed limestone or dolomite bluff or rock. Its fronds, with blue-gray, lance-shaped, ovate, or oblong leaflets, are not very fernlike.

Lowland brittle fern, also called southern fragile fern, is an easily recognized species. It’s a common springtime sight in moist forest soils.

Bracken is a fern found nearly worldwide. Its 2–3 times compound leaves are triangular in outline and arise singly from the underground creeping rhizome.

Four species of adder’s tongue ferns occur in Missouri. They don’t look like typical ferns. They have spoon-shaped leaves and an upright spore-bearing stalk.