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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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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Trout Lily

A delicate spring ephemeral named for its mottled, trout-patterned leaves and nodding yellow lily flowers. It forms vast, slow-spreading woodland colonies that can be over a century old.

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Toad Lily

Toad lily is a shade perennial bearing exotic, orchid-like flowers heavily speckled with purple in late summer and fall. Its intricate blooms reward a close look in the woodland garden.

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Peace Lily

The peace lily is a popular flowering houseplant with glossy dark green leaves and elegant white hooded blooms. It thrives in low light and even tells you when it's thirsty by dramatically drooping.

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Lily of the Valley

A low, spreading shade groundcover with arching sprays of tiny, intensely fragrant white bells in spring. Beautiful and beloved, with broad glossy leaves rising from creeping rhizomes.

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Canna Lily

Canna lily is a bold tropical perennial grown for its large paddle-shaped leaves and vivid flower spikes. Despite the name it's not a true lily, and its rhizomes are lifted in cold climates.

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Calla Lily

Calla lilies are elegant plants grown for their sculptural, trumpet-shaped flower bracts in white and rich jewel tones above arrow-shaped leaves. Despite the name, they are not true lilies.

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Water Oak

Water oak is a fast-growing, semi-evergreen red-oak-group tree of the southeastern US, common along streams and in yards. It has spatula-shaped leaves but is relatively short-lived.

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Gladiolus

Gladiolus is a tall summer bulb that sends up dramatic spikes of funnel-shaped flowers in nearly every color, a staple of cutting gardens and floral arrangements.

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Sourwood

Sourwood is a graceful native North American tree with drooping clusters of white lily-of-the-valley-like summer flowers and outstanding scarlet fall foliage.

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Hosta

The premier foliage perennial for shade, grown for bold mounds of ribbed leaves in greens, blues, golds, and variegated patterns. Lavender or white flower spikes are a summer bonus.

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Dallisgrass

Dallisgrass is a coarse, fast-growing perennial bunchgrass that is valued as forage in pastures but reviled as a tough, clumping weed in lawns.

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Amaryllis

The popular indoor amaryllis is a bulb (genus Hippeastrum) that produces towering stalks topped with huge, trumpet-shaped flowers, often forced for winter bloom. True Amaryllis is a separate South African genus.

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Dawn Redwood

A fast-growing 'living fossil' conifer that drops its feathery needles each fall, once known only from fossils until living trees were discovered in China in the 1940s.

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Bacopa

Trailing bacopa is a delicate spiller covered in small five-petaled white, pink, or blue flowers, ideal for cascading from baskets and containers.

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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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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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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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River Birch

A fast-growing native birch famous for its showy, peeling cinnamon-and-cream bark and tolerance of wet soils. The most heat-tolerant of North American birches.

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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.

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Green Ash

Green ash is a tough, adaptable deciduous tree once widely planted for shade, with compound leaves and yellow fall color; its survival is now threatened across North America by the emerald ash borer.

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American Elm

American elm is a stately deciduous tree famous for its graceful vase-shaped canopy, once a beloved street tree until Dutch elm disease devastated populations; disease-resistant cultivars now revive its use.

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Japanese Andromeda

Japanese andromeda is an elegant evergreen shrub with cascading clusters of urn-shaped flowers in early spring and colorful new growth. It pairs beautifully with azaleas and rhododendrons.

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Flamingo Flower

A tropical plant famous for its glossy, heart-shaped red 'flowers' (actually spathes) with a protruding spadix. Long-lasting blooms make it a popular gift plant.

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