Field Guide

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.

Mud plantains have glossy, rounded or kidney-shaped leaves and purple or white flowers that have six petal lobes. One petal lobe points downward. They typically grow as emergent aquatic shoreline plants.

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.

With its large, paddle-shaped, blue-green leaves, powdery thalia looks a lot like the tropical cannas used in landscaping. In late summer, this native pond or marsh plant produces tall spikes of purple flower clusters.

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.

Buffalo grass is a native perennial warm-season short grass that creeps widely by runners and forms dense mats. As a native, it occurs in the prairies in far northwest Missouri, but it now occurs elsewhere in the state and has become popular as a lawn grass.