Plant Encyclopedia

Search and identify 1,000+ plants, flowers, trees, and succulents — with care, light, water, and how to tell them apart.

all houseplant flower tree shrub succulent herb fern grass

Angel Wing Begonia

A cane-stemmed begonia with asymmetrical, wing-shaped leaves often spotted silver and flushed red underneath, topped by dangling clusters of flowers. It is a free-flowering, upright houseplant.

houseplant

Wisteria

Wisteria is a vigorous woody climbing vine famous for dramatic cascades of fragrant purple, blue, or white flowers in spring. It is beautiful but can become invasive and needs firm pruning.

shrub

White Oak

White oak is a majestic, long-lived North American hardwood with rounded leaf lobes and prized, water-tight timber. A keystone forest tree, it can live for centuries and supports a vast web of wildlife.

tree

Sugar Maple

Sugar maple is a hallmark of North America's blazing autumn forests and the maple traditionally tapped for its sap. It is a large, long-lived shade tree with dense, hard wood prized for furniture and flooring.

tree

Sandbur

Sandbur is a warm-season grass infamous for its sharp, spiny seed burs that cling painfully to skin, clothing, and animal fur. It thrives in dry, sandy, disturbed soils and is a troublesome weed of lawns and pastures.

grass

Cebu Blue Pothos

Cebu Blue is a fast-growing aroid prized for its shimmery, silvery-blue lance-shaped leaves. As it matures it can fenestrate, developing splits reminiscent of its relative Epipremnum pinnatum.

houseplant

Gorgon's Grotto

A bold aeonium hybrid forming large, layered rosettes of green leaves often streaked with cream-yellow variegation and red margins. Its dense, ruffled rosettes look like coral or a sea grotto.

succulent

Privet

A fast-growing, dense deciduous-to-semi-evergreen shrub long used for clipped hedges. It bears panicles of small white flowers and black berries, but is invasive in many regions.

shrub

Purslane

Purslane is a low, succulent annual with fleshy paddle-shaped leaves and trailing reddish stems. A widespread plant of warm, sunny ground, it grows both wild and as a cultivated garden vegetable.

succulent

Prayer Plant

A low-growing tropical foliage plant famous for folding its decoratively veined leaves upward at night, like hands in prayer. Its oval leaves show striking patterns of green, cream and red.

houseplant

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.

flower

Plantain

Broadleaf plantain is a tough, low-growing lawn and trail-side herb (not the banana relative) with broad ribbed leaves arranged in a flat rosette. It is one of the most common colonizers of compacted ground.

herb

Pignut Hickory

Pignut hickory is a tall, upland hickory of eastern North America with smooth gray bark and pear-shaped nuts. It is valued for tough wood, brilliant golden fall color, and as wildlife habitat.

tree

Peperomia

A diverse genus of compact, slow-growing houseplants with thick, often succulent-like leaves in a huge range of textures and colors. Their small size makes them ideal for desks and shelves.

houseplant

Paperbark Maple

Paperbark maple is a small ornamental maple famous for its cinnamon-colored bark that peels in papery curls year-round and its fiery red-orange autumn foliage. It offers four-season interest in a compact form.

tree

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.

flower

Monstera Obliqua

A rare, almost mythical Monstera whose paper-thin leaves are more hole than leaf, with fenestrations covering up to 90% of the blade. Often confused with the common adansonii, true obliqua is extremely rare.

houseplant

Mock Orange

A deciduous shrub grown for its profuse, intensely fragrant white late-spring flowers that smell like orange blossom. Easy and hardy, it is a nostalgic favorite of cottage gardens.

shrub

Overcup Oak

Overcup oak is a flood-tolerant white oak of southern US bottomlands, named for the acorn cap that nearly encloses the nut. Its toughness makes it an increasingly popular urban shade tree.

tree

Mullein

Mullein is a striking biennial that forms a rosette of soft, woolly leaves the first year and a towering yellow flower spike the second. It is a classic wildflower herb of dry, open ground.

herb

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.

flower

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.

flower

Lupine

A striking cottage-garden perennial with tall, dense spires of pea-like flowers in vivid blues, purples, pinks, and bicolors above palmate leaves. A nitrogen-fixing legume beloved by bees.

flower

Larkspur

A cool-season annual related to delphinium, bearing tall spikes of spurred blue, purple, pink or white flowers above feathery foliage. It is a cottage-garden classic and an excellent cut flower.

flower