Plant Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ plants, flowers, trees, and succulents — with care, light, water, and how to tell them apart.
Solomon's Seal
Solomon's seal is a graceful shade perennial with arching stems lined with paired leaves and dangling white bell flowers. It brings elegant structure to woodland gardens.
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Petunia
Petunias are prolific, trumpet-shaped bedding flowers prized for nonstop summer color in containers, hanging baskets, and borders. Most garden plants are hybrids derived from South American Petunia species.
flowerPainted Dropwing
Important note: the Painted Dropwing (also called the violet dropwing) is not a plant but a dragonfly, Trithemis annulata. Mature males are a striking violet-pink with red-veined wings, often seen perched at the edges of warm ponds and streams.
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Pansy
Pansies are cool-season bedding flowers known for their large, flat, face-like blooms in a huge range of colors. They are a hybrid garden plant derived from wild violas.
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Shirley Poppy
The Shirley poppy is a refined garden strain of the wild corn poppy, bred for its delicate, papery flowers in soft pinks, whites, reds, and bicolors. These cool-season annuals self-sow freely for drifts of tissue-thin blooms.
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Saffron
An autumn-blooming crocus grown for the three crimson stigmas in each flower, which yield the spice saffron. Each flower is hand-picked, making cultivation labor-intensive.
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Nemesia
A dainty South African annual covered in masses of small two-lipped flowers, often bicolored and lightly fragrant, in a wide range of bright and pastel colors. It excels in cool-season containers, baskets and edging.
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Obedient Plant
Obedient plant is a native perennial with tall spikes of pink to white snapdragon-like flowers in late summer. It earns its name because pushed flowers stay in their new position.
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Ranunculus
Ranunculus is a cool-season tuber producing densely layered, rose-like flowers in jewel and pastel tones, a darling of cut-flower growers and spring gardens.
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Purple Coneflower
Purple coneflower is a tough, long-blooming prairie perennial with daisy-like pink-purple flowers and a raised, spiny orange center that draws butterflies and bees.
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Marigold
A cheerful, easy annual with pompom-like flowers in gold, orange, and red, and pungent foliage. Marigolds bloom all season and are popular for borders and companion planting.
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Meadow Rue
Meadow rue is an airy perennial with delicate, columbine-like foliage and fluffy clouds of tiny lilac, pink, or white flowers. It brings a soft, ethereal texture to part-shade borders.
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Milkweed
Milkweed is a hardy native perennial with fragrant flower clusters and milky sap, best known as the essential host plant for monarch butterflies. Its seed pods release silk-tufted seeds in fall.
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Mexican Sunflower
A tall, fast-growing annual prized for its vivid orange-red daisy flowers that are magnets for butterflies and bees. It thrives in heat and poor soil where many other plants struggle.
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Lupin
Lupin is a striking perennial bearing tall, dense spikes of pea-like flowers in vivid colors above palmate leaves. A legume, it fixes nitrogen and is a cottage-garden showstopper.
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Love-Lies-Bleeding
A dramatic annual amaranth grown for its long, ropelike crimson flower tassels that drape downward in bold cascades.
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Rattlesnake Master
A distinctive prairie perennial with yucca-like, spiny-edged leaves and greenish-white, golf-ball-shaped flower heads. Despite its name, it is a member of the carrot family.
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Red Hot Poker
Red hot poker is a bold perennial sending up torch-like spikes of tubular flowers that grade from fiery red at the top to yellow below. Its grassy clumps and dramatic blooms attract hummingbirds and bees.
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Prairie Smoke
A charming North American prairie wildflower named for its feathery, smoke-like pink seed heads that follow nodding maroon spring flowers.
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Marsh Marigold
A cheerful wetland perennial that lights up pond edges and marshes with glossy, buttercup-yellow flowers in early spring. A member of the buttercup family, it thrives in mud and standing water where few other flowers bloom so early.
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Lady's Mantle
Lady's mantle is a soft, mounding perennial known for its scalloped, pleated leaves that catch dewdrops like beads of mercury, topped by airy sprays of chartreuse-green flowers. It is a versatile, low-maintenance plant for edging and softening borders.
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Lamb's Ear
Lamb's ear is a drought-tolerant perennial grown for its soft, silvery, densely woolly leaves that feel like felt. It forms low spreading mats topped by fuzzy flower spikes in summer.
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Lily
True lilies are summer-blooming bulbs with large, often fragrant, trumpet-shaped flowers on tall stems. They are easy garden perennials prized in borders and as cut flowers.
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Lobelia
Edging lobelia is a low, mounding or trailing annual smothered in tiny, intensely blue flowers from spring to frost. It's a staple of hanging baskets, window boxes and bedding borders.
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Pigsqueak
Pigsqueak is an evergreen perennial with large, glossy, leathery leaves and early-spring clusters of pink flowers. Its name comes from the squeak the leaves make when rubbed.
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Joe-Pye Weed
Joe-Pye weed is a tall, native North American perennial topped with large, domed clusters of mauve-pink flowers in late summer. A pollinator powerhouse, it brings height and butterfly-friendly blooms to moist, sunny gardens and rain gardens.
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Passionflower
Passionflower is a vigorous climbing vine famous for its intricate, fringed purple-and-white blooms. The maypop form (Passiflora incarnata) is hardy in temperate gardens and produces egg-shaped fruits.
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Phlox
Phlox are North American perennials ranging from low spring-flowering carpets to tall, fragrant summer border plants. Their massed clusters of five-petaled flowers draw butterflies and perfume the garden.
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Morning Glory
Morning glory is a fast-growing twining vine whose trumpet-shaped flowers unfurl at dawn and close by afternoon, quickly covering fences and trellises.
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Ironweed
A tall, robust native perennial crowned in late summer with clusters of intensely purple flowers. Its tough, wiry stems and iron-hard durability give it its name.
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Indian Pipe
A ghostly white, leafless woodland plant that lacks chlorophyll and survives by parasitizing fungi, appearing as eerie translucent stems on the forest floor.
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Pasque Flower
Pasque flower is an early-spring perennial bearing silky, bell-shaped purple flowers cloaked in fine hairs, followed by ornamental feathery seed heads. It blooms around Easter, giving it its name.
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Oxeye Daisy
A classic white-and-yellow daisy native to Europe and naturalized across North America, the oxeye daisy is the wild ancestor of garden Shasta daisies. It thrives in meadows, roadsides, and disturbed ground.
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Jacob's Ladder
Jacob's ladder is a graceful perennial named for its neat, ladder-like rows of paired leaflets. In late spring it bears clusters of bell- to cup-shaped blue, white or pink flowers, making it a fine choice for cottage and woodland-edge gardens.
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Geum
Geum, or avens, is a clump-forming perennial with airy stems of cheerful red, orange, or yellow flowers above hairy basal foliage. It blooms from late spring into summer in cottage borders.
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Hellebore
An evergreen shade perennial that blooms in late winter and early spring, when little else does, with nodding, cup-shaped flowers in white, pink, plum, and green. Long-lived and deer-resistant.
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Heucherella
Heucherella, or foamy bells, is a colorful hybrid perennial combining the bold foliage of coral bells with the airy flower sprays of foamflower. It offers striking leaves in many colors plus dainty spring blooms.
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Moth Orchid
The moth orchid is the most popular orchid for beginners, prized for arching sprays of broad, flat flowers that can last for months in shades of white, pink, and more.
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Mayapple
A woodland wildflower forming colonies of umbrella-like leaves, with a single white flower hidden beneath that ripens into a yellow fruit.
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Monkey Flower
A cheerful moisture-loving wildflower with snapdragon-like blooms, often spotted, whose grinning face inspired the common name monkey flower.
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New England Aster
A robust native perennial that crowns the fall garden with masses of purple, daisy-like flowers around golden centers. It is a magnet for late-season bees and migrating monarch butterflies.
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Gazania
A sun-loving, drought-tolerant South African plant with large, daisy-like flowers in brilliant orange, yellow, red, pink and cream, often boldly striped. The blooms open in bright sun and close in shade or cloudy weather.
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Painted Daisy
Painted daisy is a hardy perennial bearing cheerful daisy flowers in pink, red, and white with golden centers over fern-like foliage. Its flowers are the natural source of the insecticide pyrethrum.
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Great Blue Lobelia
A native North American perennial producing tall spikes of vivid blue, two-lipped flowers in late summer. It is the blue counterpart to the red cardinal flower and loves moist ground.
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Melampodium
Melampodium, or butter daisy, is a tough, heat-loving annual that forms neat mounds covered in small golden-yellow daisies all summer. It thrives in hot, humid conditions and is virtually maintenance-free.
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Moonflower
A fast-growing tropical vine whose large, fragrant white flowers unfurl at dusk and bloom through the night, closing by morning. Related to morning glory, it is grown on trellises for evening fragrance and night-garden drama.
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Freesia
Freesia is a South African bulb prized for its arching sprays of richly perfumed, funnel-shaped flowers in a rainbow of colors, popular as a cut flower.
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Musk Thistle
Musk thistle is a spiny biennial weed with large, nodding rose-purple flower heads; native to Eurasia, it is an aggressive invader of pastures and rangelands across North America.
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