Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: Blue Eyed Grass
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Tagged: blue
Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: Wild Blue Phlox
Also known as Wild Sweet William, Wild Blue Phlox is a favorite spring wildflower gives bright splashes of color to the woodlands. Growing best in the dappled shade of the woodland borders and preferring well drained ground, you often see Blue Phlox decorating the edges of trails.
Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: The Violets
The spring-blooming violets capture the romantic imagination of poets and songwriters. Growing in well-drained yet fairly moist areas in the hills of the Ozarks, there are dozens of different species and variations. You will see violets that are blue, purple, lavender, white, and yellow. Some are bicolored. Some are striped. Many have little fuzzy beards in the throat of the flower.
Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: Bird’s Foot Violet
These are really a nice flower. They’re tough as nails and grow on the scruffy edges of roads and on glades where it’s dry. The foliage is subtle and lies below the large blue flat-faced flowers held on single stems coming from the center of the plant. The flowers are larger than you would expect from the foliage. The leaves, by the way, are where this plant gets its common name, Bird’s Foot Violet. Because the leaves are forked like a bird’s foot.
Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: Hepatica americana
Hiking quickly up a hill near a river, trying to avoid sliding into the mud, I looked down and saw this slightly bluish wildlower and assumed it was a Rue Anemone. I reached down to snap a picture and then moved on. When I got back home and looked that the pictures I was stunned to see this plant had interesting mottled tri-lobed leaves that looked like they’d already lived through a winter. What I had seen was actually Roundlobe Hepatica, or Hepatica americana.
Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: Virginia Bluebells
Virginia Bluebells, also known as Mertensia virginica are a spring ephemeral. That means the plant grows in the spring but doesn’t last through the summer. The foliage will die back by midsummer and the plant will go dormant. This strategy is common in spring plants and serves to protect them from the harsh dry conditions of late summer on the forest floor.
Ozarks Spring Wildflowers: Least Bluet
I must admit that I’m partial to blue flowers and they always catch my eye. Even when they’re so tiny that nobody else ever sees them. And this is the case with the Least Bluet. They grow in full sun and I typically see them on the wet gloppy part of a glade, in between the stones. These Bluets are quite uniform in appearance, being all the same size and all the same color and all the same height in any given location. They’re tiny. About 3/8″ across standing on stems about 2″ in height.