Plant Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ plants, flowers, trees, and succulents — with care, light, water, and how to tell them apart.
Borage
A fast-growing annual herb with brilliant blue star-shaped flowers and bristly, cucumber-scented leaves. A magnet for bees, it self-seeds freely and is a favorite of pollinator gardens.
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Bouncing Bet
A vigorous old-fashioned perennial with clusters of fragrant pink flowers whose roots and leaves lather like soap, long used as a natural cleanser for textiles.
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Cumin
Cumin is a small annual herb in the carrot family grown for its seeds, a widely used culinary spice. It needs a long, hot, sunny season to ripen.
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Brussels Sprouts
Brussels sprouts are a cool-season brassica that produces dozens of small, cabbage-like buds along a tall central stalk. Slow to mature, they are a hallmark of autumn and winter gardens.
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Turmeric
Turmeric is an aromatic tropical perennial in the ginger family, grown for its vivid orange rhizome.
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Yellow Woodsorrel
Yellow woodsorrel is a common clover-like weed with heart-shaped leaflets and small yellow flowers. It self-sows aggressively in lawns, gardens, and pots.
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Wild Mustard
Wild mustard, or charlock, is a fast-growing annual weed of fields and roadsides with bright yellow four-petaled flowers. It is an aggressive crop weed.
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Rosemary
An aromatic, woody Mediterranean herb with needle-like evergreen leaves and a piney fragrance, grown as a culinary herb and as a drought-tolerant ornamental shrub.
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Wild Onion
A native North American perennial onion with flat, grass-like leaves and bulbs that emit a clear onion scent. It commonly appears in lawns, meadows and woodland edges and is regarded as both a wildflower and a lawn weed.
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Watercress
Watercress is a fast-growing semi-aquatic perennial in the cabbage family, with crisp dark-green leaves on sprawling, rooting stems. It naturally grows in cool, clean flowing water.
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Wormwood
Wormwood is a silvery, aromatic perennial herb best known as the signature botanical associated with absinthe and vermouth. Its finely divided gray-green foliage is aromatic and drought-tough.
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Feverfew
Feverfew is a bushy, aromatic herb covered in small white daisy flowers with yellow centers. It is a cheerful, easy cottage-garden plant with feathery, citrus-scented foliage.
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Green Bean
Green beans are the young pods of the common bean, picked while still slender before the seeds mature. They come in bush and pole forms and are among the most reliable and rewarding crops for home gardens.
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Edamame
Edamame is a warm-season legume in the pea family, a bushy annual grown from young green soybeans. The plant fixes its own nitrogen and forms fuzzy green pods.
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Holy Basil
Holy basil, or tulsi, is an aromatic herb in the mint family, sacred in Hinduism. More clove-scented than sweet basil, it is grown in gardens and containers and traditionally near homes and temples.
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Cauliflower
Cauliflower is a cool-season member of the cabbage family grown for its dense white head of immature flower buds, called a curd. It is one of the more demanding brassicas, needing steady cool conditions to head up well.
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Angelica
Angelica is a stately, architectural biennial herb in the carrot family with huge domed greenish-white flower heads and bold, divided foliage. It is a dramatic showpiece in herb and ornamental gardens.
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Agrimony
Agrimony is an upright perennial herb topped with slender spires of small yellow flowers that smell faintly of apricot. It produces bur-like seeds that cling to passersby.
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Valerian
Valerian is a tall perennial herb with frothy, sweetly scented flower heads borne on upright clump-forming stems. It is grown as an ornamental for its airy white-to-pink blooms and ferny foliage.
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Arugula
Arugula is a fast-growing, cool-season leafy green in the brassica family. It goes from seed to a low rosette of lobed leaves in a matter of weeks.
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Boneset
Boneset is a native North American wildflower with clusters of fuzzy white blooms and distinctive leaves that appear pierced by the stem. It is valued as a pollinator plant for moist gardens.
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Amaranth
Amaranth is a vigorous annual grown for its dramatic drooping crimson flower tassels and broad, often red-tinged leaves. It has been cultivated for thousands of years across the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
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Velvetleaf
A tall summer annual with large, soft, heart-shaped velvety leaves and yellow flowers, a major agricultural weed of corn and soybean fields. Its distinctive cup-shaped seed pods and fibrous stems make it easy to recognize.
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Sweet Potato
Sweet potato is a warm-season trailing vine grown as a crop for its swollen storage roots. Unrelated to the common potato, it belongs to the morning glory family and thrives in long, hot summers.
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Astragalus
A hardy perennial legume native to northern China and nearby regions, grown for its long, fibrous taproot. It is drought-tolerant and thrives in well-drained soils.
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Dog Fennel
Dog fennel is a tall, feathery-leaved native weed of the southeastern United States that forms dense stands in old fields and roadsides and has an aromatic, somewhat unpleasant scent.
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Spotted Spurge
Spotted spurge is a low, fast-spreading summer weed that forms flat mats with small reddish-spotted leaves and a milky sap, common in lawns, sidewalks and gardens.
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Dandelion
The dandelion is a familiar, resilient perennial with sunny yellow flowers and toothed leaves, widely recognized as both a common lawn weed and a cheerful wildflower.
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Creeping Charlie
Creeping Charlie is a low, aromatic perennial in the mint family that spreads aggressively by creeping stems to form dense mats in lawns and shady gardens. Its scalloped, round leaves and small blue-violet flowers make it easy to recognize and notoriously hard to eradicate.
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St. John's Wort
St. John's wort is a hardy yellow-flowered perennial with masses of five-petaled summer blooms. Tough and drought-tolerant, it is also a noxious weed in many grazing regions.
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Cucumber
Cucumber is a warm-season vining plant in the gourd family, grown for its long green fruits. It is fast-growing and productive when given heat, sun, and steady moisture.
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Skullcap
Skullcap is a slender North American mint-family herb with tiny blue, two-lipped flowers. It takes its name from the small helmet- or skull-cap-shaped appendage on the calyx of each bloom.
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Corn Speedwell
Corn speedwell is a tiny low-growing winter annual weed with small, deep-blue flowers and rounded toothed leaves. It commonly carpets lawns, gardens, and bare ground in late winter and spring.
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Cilantro
A fast-growing aromatic annual herb grown in gardens worldwide. Its finely divided foliage is known as cilantro and its small round seeds as coriander.
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Comfrey
Comfrey is a vigorous, deep-rooted perennial famous as a garden fertilizer. Its rough leaves and bell-shaped flowers grow back fast, making it a favorite for nutrient-rich liquid plant feeds.
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Chamomile
Chamomile is a daisy-like aromatic herb famous for its small, apple-scented white-and-yellow flowers.
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Cocklebur
Cocklebur is a coarse annual weed famous for its hard, hooked burs that cling to fur and clothing. It is a serious agricultural and pasture pest.
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Chives
Chives are a clump-forming perennial culinary herb in the onion family, grown for their slender hollow leaves and pompom-like purple flowers.
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Catmint
A soft, billowing perennial with gray-green aromatic foliage and a long haze of small lavender-blue flowers. Tough, drought-proof, deer-resistant, and a magnet for bees.
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Celery
Celery is a marsh-loving biennial grown for its long, ribbed leaf stalks. It is famously demanding, needing rich soil and constant moisture to grow well.
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Catnip
Catnip is a hardy, easy-growing mint-family herb famous for the response it triggers in many cats. It is also a useful pollinator and pest-repelling plant.
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Carrot
The carrot is a popular root vegetable grown for its taproot, most familiar in orange but also available in purple, red, yellow, and white. It is a biennial usually harvested in its first year.
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Cloudberry
Cloudberry is a low-growing Arctic and subarctic plant bearing distinctive amber berries. It demands cold, acidic, boggy conditions and is notoriously difficult to cultivate.
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Chickweed
Chickweed is a low, sprawling annual often dismissed as a lawn weed, with weak stems and tiny white star-shaped flowers that give it the name starwort.
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Chervil
A delicate annual culinary herb with lacy, fern-like leaves, grown in gardens. One of the classic French fines herbes, it prefers cool weather and light shade.
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Cantaloupe
Cantaloupe is a warm-season trailing vine in the gourd family, grown for its round, netted melons. It needs long, hot summers and plenty of sun.
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Wild Bergamot
An aromatic North American mint-family perennial topped with ragged lavender flower heads that are magnets for bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds.
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Watermelon
Watermelon is a sprawling, heat-loving vine in the gourd family grown for its very large fruits. It needs a long, hot season and plenty of room to develop well.
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