Plant Encyclopedia

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

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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.

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Yellow Trumpet Tree

The yellow trumpet tree erupts in brilliant golden-yellow trumpet flowers in spring, usually while leafless, making it one of the most dazzling tropical flowering trees. It is the national tree of Brazil.

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Red Tip Photinia

Red tip photinia is a fast-growing evergreen shrub famous for its brilliant red new growth that matures to glossy green. It is one of the most popular shrubs for tall hedges and screens.

shrub

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

Tomato

The tomato is one of the world's most popular garden plants, a warm-season fruiting member of the nightshade family grown on sprawling or vining stems. It comes in countless cultivars from tiny cherries to giant beefsteaks.

herb

Quaking Aspen

A fast-growing native tree whose flat-stalked leaves tremble in the slightest breeze and turn brilliant gold in fall. It forms vast clonal groves and is the most widely distributed tree in North America.

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London Plane Tree

The London plane is a large, pollution-tolerant hybrid shade tree famous for its mottled, peeling camouflage bark and spherical seed balls, making it one of the world's most planted urban street trees.

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Lemon Myrtle

Lemon myrtle is an Australian rainforest tree whose glossy leaves carry one of the most intense natural lemon fragrances of any plant, driven by very high citral content. It is grown as an aromatic ornamental.

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Illawarra Flame Tree

The Illawarra flame tree is a striking Australian native that sheds its leaves and covers itself in masses of brilliant scarlet bell-shaped flowers in early summer. It is one of Australia's most spectacular flowering trees.

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Beet

Beet is a cool-season root vegetable grown for its rounded, swollen root and its leafy greens. The familiar deep-red root is the most common, but golden, white, and striped types also exist.

herb

Holly

A classic evergreen shrub or small tree with glossy, spiny leaves and bright red berries, long associated with winter and Christmas. Most hollies need separate male and female plants for berries to form.

shrub

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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Forsythia

A tough deciduous shrub that bursts into brilliant yellow flowers along bare branches in early spring, before its leaves appear. One of the earliest and most reliable harbingers of spring in temperate gardens.

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Snake Plant

The snake plant is a tough, drought-tolerant succulent with stiff, upright sword-shaped leaves banded in green and yellow. It thrives on neglect and tolerates low light, making it one of the most beginner-friendly houseplants available.

succulent

Tamarack

Tamarack is a hardy North American deciduous conifer of cold bogs and wetlands, turning glowing gold each autumn before shedding its soft needles. It is one of the most cold-tolerant trees in North America.

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Showy Lady's Slipper

Showy Lady's Slipper is a large, slow-growing native orchid prized for its inflated white pouch flushed with rose-pink. It is the state flower of Minnesota and one of the most spectacular wild orchids of North America.

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Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is a fast-growing, aromatic Australian tree prized for its fragrant, oil-rich foliage and distinctive peeling bark. The blue gum is one of the most widely planted species worldwide for timber and ornamental use.

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Potato

The potato is a cool-season nightshade-family plant grown for its starchy underground tubers, among the world's most widely cultivated staple crops. It is grown from 'seed potatoes' that sprout into leafy plants.

herb

Monterey Pine

Monterey Pine is a fast-growing California coastal pine that, though limited in the wild, has become the world's most widely planted plantation pine. It bears needles in threes and asymmetrical, long-lasting cones.

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Heliotrope

A tender shrubby perennial loved for dense clusters of tiny purple flowers with an intense vanilla-cherry fragrance, earning it the nickname 'cherry pie plant.' It is grown as a fragrant bedding and container plant in most climates.

flower

Cherimoya Tree

A subtropical fruit tree from the Andean highlands, recognized by its large, heart-shaped fruits with green, scale-patterned skin. It tolerates light frost better than most tropical fruit trees.

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Annual Bluegrass

A low-growing, light-green annual grass that is one of the most widespread lawn and turf weeds in the world. It forms clumps, seeds prolifically even when mowed short, and turns unsightly in summer heat.

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Haworthia

A small, slow-growing rosette succulent often called the zebra plant for the raised white bands on its dark green leaves. Compact and slow-growing, it thrives on neglect and tolerates lower light than most succulents.

succulent

Red Maple

Red maple is one of North America's most widespread and adaptable trees, prized for its brilliant scarlet fall color and early red flowers. It thrives in a remarkable range of soils, from swamps to dry ridges.

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