Field Guide

River oats is a native cool-season grass that is common nearly statewide in bottomlands, stream valleys, and other moist places. The open, nodding, flattened flower and seed clusters are distinctive.

Switchgrass is a native perennial, warm-season, clump-forming mid or tall grass. In midsummer, delicate-looking, open, multiply-branching flowering clusters rise above the foliage.

A native of Europe, Timothy is a common cool-season pasture grass and occurs in a wide variety of open or disturbed habitats. It is one of the worst causes of hay fever in the late spring and early summer.

Virginia wild rye can be identified by its bristly seed heads, which are held erect and whose bristle-like awns stay straight. This is a common native perennial tuft-forming, cool-season midgrass usually reaching about 2–4 feet in height.

Bladderworts are Missouri’s only carnivorous plants. They are branching, rootless, aquatic plants that tend to grow in thick, floating mats under the water. The leaves are threadlike. The flowers resemble tiny yellow snapdragons and are held above the water.

A plant of shorelines and shallow water, tall burhead has clusters of beaked seeds that develop in the fall. Hundreds of these spiny seed heads, held in clusters above the water, make it distinctive.

With their whorl of oval leaves with thick, ridged stems, water plantains look like giant versions of the plantains that commonly appear in yards. Water plantains are water-edge plants that bear large, branching stalks of tiny white flowers.

Water star-grass is an attractive underwater plant. When it flowers, it’s easy to identify. Each bloom is a bright yellow star with six narrow petal lobes, raised just above the water surface.

Blue grama is a native perennial warm-season short grass that forms dense clumps. The flowering stems are 6–12 inches tall, and the short, curving, one-sided seed head resembles an eyebrow. In Missouri, it occurs mostly in our northwestern loess hill prairies.

Bottlebrush grass is a native perennial, tuft-forming wild rye that typically grows in woodlands. The widely spaced spikelets spread away at a right angle from the main flowering stem.