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A perennial vegetable similar to Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) or Spinaches (Spinacia oleracea). Grows well in partial shade. When started from seed, takes several years before it is big enough to harvest. Has a taproot that grows bigger to store energy for next year's growth.

Very slender leaves that are often blue-green. Stays in a dense clump. The flowers and seed heads are like eyebrows or combs, on stems that rise high above the leaves. It's one of my favorites.

A warm-season grass. It grows in summer while temperatures are warm, and the leaves turn straw yellow through the winter. It has very low water needs once established, because it uses the C4 carbon fixation pathway, which is very efficient in hot and dry conditions.

Nasty. Spreads by underground rhizomes, which are hard to pull up because they're somewhat brittle. Also has a deep taproot that it can probably resprout from. There's a patch in our yard that really needs to be killed.

Very similar to Dutchman's breeches (Dicentra cucullaria). The leaves are difficult or impossible to tell apart. I have had the plants for many years now, but they have never bloomed. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

According to my book on the bleeding-heart family, the tubers are yellow and larger than those of Dutchman's breeches, and often not as deeply buried. They are usually called bulblets, but that is simply because there is no word for miniature tuber. They are actually tubers since they do not consist of overlapping scales like other bulbs (for instance, onions).

The flowers bloom a week later than Dutchman's breeches, and of course the shape is very different, with much shorter pouches near the stem of the flower.

The root is a cluster of tiny tubers on a straight rootstock. They are typically called bulblets, but that's simply because there's no word for miniature tuber. The tubers can be broken off and replanted, and the next year they will sprout their own leaves. They take a few years before they are big enough to bloom.

Produces more umbels of flowers than most milkweeds. Tolerates dry soil, and (I think) stays in a clump, unlike common milkweed.

In my garden, this species blooms a little later than Virginia and slender mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum and tenuifolium), so it extends the season of mountain-mint blooms by several weeks.

Very aggressive. Sends out underground runners (rhizomes), often several feet long, that start new stems. If you simply pull up the stems, the plant will often sprout several new stems from a buried portion of the stem (if you didn't manage to cut all of it off down to the rhizome), or, more slowly, from the rhizome. Stems often come up in lawns, between cracks in a paved walkway, or other inconvenient places. You can sometimes see where a buried rhizome is by the line of stems that it sends up. I haven't had much luck digging up rhizomes. They tend to be several inches deep, and they're pretty easy to snap off, preventing you from pulling up the whole length of them.

It's admirable to plant food for monarchs, but it's better to choose species that stay in a clump, like swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa), poke milkweed (Asclepias exaltata), tall green milkweed (Asclepias hirtella), or spider milkweed (Asclepias viridis). I'm pretty sure all these are clump-forming, and each of them has flower colors, sizes, and soil moisture and sun preferences.

Other rhizomatous milkweeds include showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa), purple milkweed (Asclepias purpurascens), Sullivant's milkweed (Asclepias sullivantii), and whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata). Some of these may spread a little slower than common milkweed. I think the first three are also wonderfully fragrant like common milkweed, but I have yet to try them. Whorled milkweed is much shorter and slenderer, and the flowers are so fascinatingly intricate that I love it even though it spreads.

Unlike common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) and several other milkweed species, this one does not spread by underground rhizomes. It is short and stays in a neat clump, which gets bigger every year. It's a good choice for small yards or formal gardens.

The root is a thick taproot, not a tuber as the species name tuberosa would suggest. In the case of this species, the Latin word tuberosa means "having swellings" and refers to bulges that sometimes develop on the taproot.

Common dandelion is very similar to red-seeded dandelion (Taraxacum erythrospermum), which has also been introduced to North America. The two can be distinguished by the shape of the leaves, features in the green bracts (phyllaries) surrounding the head of flowers, and the color of the seeds.

In this species, the bottom of the corm elongates downwards so that it looks rather like a taproot. The fibrous roots that come from the corm may go down 15 feet. This allows it to survive when the soil at the surface is completely dry. It may also develop short rhizomes. In contrast, most other Liatris species have flattened-round corms.

This species was hybridized with less hardy rhododendrons to yield hardy cultivars.

Very closely related to Rhododendron (Rhododendron dauricum), and the two form a continuum. The largest difference is that R. mucronulatum is deciduous, while R. dauricum is evergreen.

A tenacious weed. Stems are stiff, cane-like, and somewhat brittle. Grows from fleshy taproots that break when you try to pull them, and go so deep that they are difficult to dig up. Produces many seedlings. Flowers are pretty, and fragrant in the evening, but it's difficult to both enjoy the flowers and prevent the plant from going to seed.

Prairie smoke is odd. The flowers point downwards, and they never open fully. There's just a little round hole at the bottom that bumblebees can get into. The inside of the flower is similar to a strawberry flower. There is a round head of carpels (the female part of the flower) surrounded by a ring of lots of stamens (the male, pollen-producing part), with nectar near the bases of the stamens. If a flower is pollinated, it turns upwards, and the carpels turn into seeds with long hairy tails that look like pink smoke.

Unlike most spring ephemerals, bloodroot doesn't necessarily lose its leaves right after the seed ripens. It can keep its leaves pretty far into summer if the roots don't dry out. The longer the leaves collect sun and create food, the more flowers and offsets the roots will produce the next year. So I found out last year when I carefully watered my bloodroot whenever it started to wilt, though I don't remember exactly how long the leaves lasted. At least into July. My clump really needs to be divided now, since the leaves are overlapping.

There's a fair amount of variability in the shape of the petals. Mine are long and thin, but others are wider. This can be seen in the photos here. Strangely, the flowers with long thin petals are reminiscent of Mentzelia decapetala, an entirely unrelated biennial flower that grows in very dry soil in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains regions.

Very cute little plant. Shorter and smaller-leaved than the more commonly grown European subspecies, and seems to branch more often. We call it lingonberry here in Minnesota because lots of us are Scandinavian.

I've observed a mining bee (Andrena) visiting the flowers. Not sure if bumblebees are interested in such tiny flowers.

We had a daylily growing thickly in several places in our yard. I believe it is double when it actually flowers, so must be this cultivar, but it doesn't bloom very often. Now most of it is gone, because it doesn't bloom enough and spreads way too much.

Native to North America. Very similar to Geum ternatum, the species from Asia and Europe. Not sure what the differences are.

This species is native to Asia and Europe. Very similar to Geum fragarioides, the North American species. Not sure what the differences are.