Field Guide

Ground plum is a legume that bears plumlike, edible fruits. Its short, spikelike clusters of pea flowers can be white, cream, yellow, pink, or violet.

Wild strawberry is one of the parents of the cultivated strawberry and is one of our prized native wild edibles. It’s also a valuable food for innumerable animals, and it’s attractive in native wildflower gardens.

Of the many invasive nonnative plants that were originally introduced to stop soil erosion and improve soils, kudzu is one of the worst. This “vine that ate the South” is often the first plant that comes to mind when we think of “invasive plants.”

Yellow wood sorrel is both a garden weed and a wild edible. It has a pleasant sour taste, which is why some people call it sourgrass and add it to salads.

Queen Anne’s lace is many things to many people — roadside wildflower, noxious introduced weed, wild edible, medicinal herb, delightful cut flower. In Missouri, it blooms May through October.

Missouri has two species of sweet cicely, which can be hard to tell apart. Both have umbels of small white flowers, fernlike leaves, and sweetly aromatic, carrotlike roots.

Spring branches and streams in the Ozarks are decorated with large colonies of these plants, which can grow like thick green garlands in the water. It has a long history of use as a salad green, and it is cultivated to sell to gourmet cooks. If you collect watercress from the wild, make sure to wash it thoroughly.

Wild and cultivated ginseng produce an annual crop in the United States and Canada valued in excess of $25 million, but overzealous collection is causing serious concern about the survival of American ginseng in the forest ecosystem.