Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube.

There are two ways a person could start an article about Mountain Death Camas (Zigadenus elegans). One introduction could include words like dangerous, poisonous, and fatal! And the other would involve words like striking, stunning, and uniquely beautiful. Let’s start with the beautiful part first.

THE BEAUTY

The flowers of Death camas have six papery white petals (or in the case of Death camas – tepals). The striking star-shaped flowers are about a 1/2-inch across. Each petal has an olive green, heart-shaped gland near its base. When the flower opens, these glands present as a lovely circle on the flower, often with an inner yellow fringe.

Bleeding Heartland is republishing this post from July 2024 to celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Happy Fourth of July!

A previous Iowa wildflower Wednesday post showcased a different collection of red, white, and blue wildflowers. Click on any link for more pictures and information about that plant.

Most of the photos enclosed below came from the Iowa wildflower enthusiasts Facebook group, which now has nearly 11,900 members. Join us to share pictures, ask ID questions, learn about gardening with native plants, or just enjoy a break from negativity on social media. It’s a politics-free zone. I also republished some pictures by Bleeding Heartland guest authors. You can find the full wildflower archive here.

Jeff Ewoldt grew up in northwest Iowa, currently practices law in Des Moines, and has always had a keen interest in nature and conservation.

On the first day of June, I headed out on my trusty mountain bike for a ride around Spencer, Iowa, intending to get some exercise and investigate wildflower activity in the northwest Iowa town where I grew up.

My primary destination was Oneota Park, located on the southeastern edge of town, not far from Spencer High School and my old neighborhood. Named for a prehistoric Native American culture that existed in the Upper Midwest from about 900 to 1700 A.D., Oneota consists of more than 220 acres of prairie and river bottom woods through which the Little Sioux River runs. It’s a place I’ve enjoyed exploring since it first became a county park in the late 1970s or early ‘80s, and the spring flowers on the expansive prairieland are particularly interesting to me.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

When I planted its seeds, I’d never met Large-flowered Beardtongue (Penstemon grandiflorus) in real life. All I knew was that it was a primeval wildflower. I wanted to see what it was like, once upon a time, back when this land was a tallgrass prairie.

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube.

It’s a legume, it’s a bush, it’s an insect pollinator and bird habitat, and in the Midwest it’s a native wildflower.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

My first look at Wild geraniums (Geranium maculatum) was on a vertical cliff, which forms the far bank of Crow Creek, near my home.

Pink-purple flowers leaned out over the stream, lavish among mosses, ferns, and other wildflowers.

I didn’t know what they were.

Patrick Swanson has been restoring a Harrison County prairie.

About six months have passed since I wrote about my experience on a fall LoHi Trek through the southern Loess Hills. This spring, LoHi Trek number 5 was held April 23-28 in the middle reaches of the Loess Hills, centered in and around Hitchcock Nature Center (HNC) in Pottawattamie County. This was my fourth LoHi Trek, and was distinctive from my previous journeys for its inclusion of an urban hike through the neighborhoods and urban core of Council Bluffs. 

Like earlier LoHi adventures, Golden Hills Resource Conservation and Development spearheaded the planning and logistics of the trip, and posted an excellent summary of each day’s activities, highlighting the many partners and volunteers that made this event possible. 

Crescent Hill at Hitchcock served as our home base, where we set up camp near the Crescent Ridge Cabin. This area was formerly operated as Mt. Crescent Ski Area; Pottawattamie County acquired it in 2021 to expand Hitchcock Nature Center to the south and develop additional recreational opportunities beyond the snow-based activities for which Mt. Crescent was well-known.

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or no holiday, I come bearing gifts on this wintry day: a photo from each of Bleeding Heartland’s 29 posts about wildflowers this year. Readers often tell me this series is their favorite thing about my website.

As in 2022 and 2023, guest authors and photographers carried much of the load for this series. In alphabetical order: Emily Bredthauer, Katie Byerly, Luuk Clark, Lora Conrad, Jeff Ewoldt, Kara Grady, Marla Mertz, Bruce Morrison, Diane Porter, Kenny Slocum, and Patrick Swanson. Special thanks to Emily, Luuk, and Jeff, who contributed to Bleeding Heartland for the first time this year.

This series will return sometime during April or May of 2025. Please reach out if you have photographs to share, especially of native plants I haven’t featured yet. The full archive of more than 300 posts featuring more than 250 species is available here. I have also compiled links to several dozen posts that covered many plants found in one area, rather than focusing on a single kind of wildflower.

For those looking for wildflower pictures year round, or seeking help with plant ID, check out the Facebook groups Flora of Iowa or Iowa wildflower enthusiasts. If you’d like a book to take with you on nature outings, Lora Conrad reviewed some of the best wildflower guides last year. A book featuring plants native to our part of the country is probably more reliable than the plant ID app on your phone.

Note from Laura Belin: Bleeding Heartland’s Iowa wildflower Wednesday series is going on winter hiatus and will return sometime in the spring of 2025. You can find all past posts focusing on specific plants here, and posts featuring many wildflowers found in one natural area here.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

I hear explosions from the kitchen. Snappy sounds, like popcorn popping. 

However, these are not popcorn. They are Wild Petunia (Ruellia humilis) seeds ricocheting against the inside of a brown paper bag.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

Rising above the dead leaves and grasses, a golden wand swept upward in the woods. It could easily be overlooked. It made me think of some slender animal, unfamiliar, perhaps mythical, standing on its hind legs to look in wonder at where it had found itself.

Lora Conrad lives on a small farm in Van Buren County.

Sassafras.

One of my favorite smaller trees, Sassafras albidum, is considered native to Iowa. However, it has been found in the wild only in one or two counties along the Mississippi River, one of which is Lee, adjacent to Van Buren where I set out two in my yard.

Sassafras is prevalent across the southeast and northeast, including adjacent Missouri and Illinois. It is a member of the Laurel family. The origin of the name is believed to be a mispronunciation by 16th century European explorers of the botanical family Saxifrage. Here is a map showing its native areas from BONAP:

Patrick Swanson has been restoring a Harrison County prairie.

The fourth iteration of the multi-day LoHi (Loess Hills) Trek was held October 16-20 in Mills and Fremont counties of southwestern Iowa. This was my third LoHi Trek, joining about 45 others hailing from Colorado to Ohio, Minnesota to Missouri, and various points in between on this unique supported camping and hiking adventure. 

Golden Hills Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D), assisted by many other partners and volunteers, organized the event and recently posted an excellent synopsis and great action photos of the daily activities. Here I will offer my own experiences as a complement to what has already been written, and reflect a bit on this journey and how it compared to the two previous treks I attended in 2021 and 2023.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

If I indulge my fantasy, I imagine asters as sentient beings, each with its own personality. If that were the case, then Willow Asters (Symphyotrichum praealtum) would be aristocrats, with their subtle lavender petals, slender leaves, and graceful poses.

If she were a lady, she would host gracious, elegant parties by a lake. Suitors would long for her attention.

There are indeed beings who visit her every hour of the day. She is always attended by bees, butterflies, and myriad other insects.

Nature nerd Emily Bredthauer took the pictures enclosed below at Cordova Park on September 22, 2024.

Cordova Park is a 1,050 acre area comprised of woodland, prairie, and bluffs overlooking Lake Red Rock in Marion County. Lake Red Rock was built in the 1960s as a flood control project on the Des Moines River. The namesake of Cordova comes from the small town that occupied the area from 1887-1962. The park boasts the tallest observation tower in a public park in the Midwest with the longest continuous fiberglass staircase in the world: The Cordova Tower. I was much more interested in what kind of plant life the park had to offer on the ground.

The plants documented below were blooming on the rocky shoreline of Lake Red Rock. I was pleasantly surprised by both the variety of wildflowers still blooming in late September and the indomitable nature of the plants that flourished along the craggy shore. 

Jeff Ewoldt grew up in northwest Iowa, currently practices law in Des Moines, and has always had a keen interest in nature and conservation. He thanks Lora Conrad for her dedication and assistance in providing identifications of most of the species shown here.

The Iowa Great Lakes region is known as one of Iowa’s preeminent tourist destinations, where recreational opportunities abound on the glacier-carved chain of lakes that most summertime visitors and year-round residents call “Okoboji.” During the growing season, the area is also a haven for wildflowers. While visiting last month, I observed many native plants in the region’s numerous nature preserves and along undeveloped shorelines.

On that particular weekend, the initial draw to northwest Iowa wasn’t the Lakes, but rather the Clay County Fair in Spencer, my hometown. I managed to find a few wildflower photo opportunities on the fairgrounds, particularly at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ display outside of the Sundholm Environmental Cabin.

This was just a prelude to the many additional wildflowers observed when, on Saturday, September 14, I ventured north into Dickinson County, my only plans being (1) to find some tacos for lunch; and (2) enjoy the outdoors.

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube.

Tall and slender, it seemed so out of place. Water parsnip (Sium suave) grows along the edges of lakes and marshes and in wet prairies. In Wilkinson Park the prairie trails are often wet so it makes sense that water parsnip grows there. But mixed in with all the other usual prairie wildflowers at Wilkinson, like blazing stars, cinquefoils, and milkweeds, it does look misplaced.

This is an image of water parsnip in July 2018 at Wilkinson Park in Rock Falls, Iowa. I recall it being the only parsnip growing there at the time. Now at least a dozen water parsnip plants grow at this spot.

Luuk Clark is a Prairie Steward and Pinnated Grouse advocate. He thanks Laura Walters of the Tallgrass Prairie Center and John Pearson of the Iowa DNR for helping him find a nearby location to photograph Silky prairie clover for this post.

Silky prairie clover (Dalea villosa) is a bit of a nomadic species relying on sandy, sparsely vegetated places. In Iowa it may be mainly associated with ancient post-glaciated delta systems and watersheds surrounding the Cedar River. 

My first time seeing it in Iowa was on a sandy “blowout” further east than the current range indicates. This does not surprise me as the changing of the natural landscape in Iowa has extirpated a plethora of our native species, and thus, our knowledge of where things historically could be found are lost with the upturned soil and disappearance of the prairie that gives Iowa its rich heritage. Its historic presence in Iowa was always considered “infrequent” even in earliest records, such as Wesley Greene’s 1907 book Plants of Iowa: A Preliminary List of the Native and Introduced Plants of the State, Not under Cultivation.

Kenny Slocum is the naturalist and natural resource manager for the Clayton County Conservation Board.

The first time I had an opportunity to write for Bleeding Heartland, I wrote about one of my favorite places. Bloody Run County Park, outside of Marquette, sparked my interest in plants years ago when I began to find a litany of unique native plants, stuff that I’d mostly consider “meat-and-potatoes” kind of species now.

Yet every year, it seems, I get the pleasure of adding a new species to my digital herbarium. Some of them, the butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and round-headed bush clover (Lespedeza capitata) and rough blazing star (Liatris aspera), in and of themselves, might not make the typical prairie-stomper excited, but it’s a thrill for me to see them in context.

Lora Conrad lives on a small farm in Van Buren County.

The American Hog Peanut is also called American Wild Peanut. Amphicarpaea bracteata is a vining annual plant in the Pea family (Fabaceae). It can also be a short lived perennial. It is somewhat unusual for a legume in that it thrives in shady areas.

Amphicarpaea is reported to mean either “two kinds of flowers” or “two kinds of fruit,” both of which it has. Bracteata means “with bracts” at the base of the flower, which show clearly in the flower photos. It is the only Amphicarpaea sp. native to eastern North America and to the west, throughout Iowa. This BONAP map shows its Iowa and nearby distribution.

Bruce Morrison is a working artist and photographer living with his wife Georgeann in rural southeast O’Brien County, Iowa. Bruce works from his studio/gallery–a renovated late 1920s brooding house/sheep barn. You can follow Morrison on his artist blog, Prairie Hill Farm Studio, or visit his website at Morrison’s studio.

I first came across Pale-spike Lobelia (Lobelia spicata) 40-45 years ago in the Waterman Wildlife Area (Waterman Prairie) in southeast O’Brien County.

When my wife and I moved to our acreage and two small pastures 22 years ago, we realized just how many native forbes and grasses had survived decades of livestock browsing. Each year we would discover new species.

In 2008 I found my first pale-spike lobelia on our own pasture, a few feet down the north slope of a gravel ridge. I recognized the plant upon close examination and marveled how diminutive they were.

“Native White Vervain (Verbena urticifolia) is notoriously difficult to photograph well,” Lora Conrad wrote in the Iowa wildflower enthusiasts Facebook group in mid-July. “Several of us have tried and admitted our failures–no, not disasters, but just not the brilliant crisp sharp photo we want of those tiny flowers and their sprangled out in all kinds of directions flower stems on that three foot high plant!!”

Lora (whose photography skills are outstanding) added that she has “deleted so many images I made of White Vervain–far far more than I have kept.” I can relate—in fact, I leaned on Phil Specht and Wendie Schneider to provide many of the pictures in my post from 2018 featuring this species.

Just for fun, Lora organized the first photo challenge in the four-year history of the Facebook group where she, Katie Byerly, and I are administrators. We crowdsourced the judging: the winner was the photo with the most “likes” in the contest thread. I enclose the top performers below, along with some other entries.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

Walking a damp trail at the woods edge, I’m surrounded by flowers. Pink and purple clusters of blossoms dangle from low branches and brush my face.

This is Groundnut (Apios americana), a native flowering vine of North America. It creates a magical feeling, like a lovers’ bower in a fantasy.

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube. Click here to watch her video on American white water-lily.

The water-lily doesn’t need much of an introduction. If you’ve seen a large white flower floating on a body of water, chances are that flower was an American white water-lily (Nymphaea odorata).

These plants like still or slow-moving water—usually a shallow lake, pond, or marsh with a mucky soiled bottom. Water-lilies will form colonies and cover a large surface of water. Their brilliant white flowers are scattered on the water like polka dots with their shiny lily pads surrounding them.

Note to readers: I learned recently that Marion County Naturalist Marla Mertz is retiring this month after nearly three decades with the Marion County Conservation Board. In honor of her career, I am republishing her outstanding 2016 post on Queen of the Prairie, one of the most impressive Iowa wildflowers. Marla took all of the photos enclosed below at Cordova Park, a reconstructed prairie.

The prairie presents her Queen! The Queen of the Prairie, Filipendula rubra. Filipendula: from Latin filum for “thread” and pendulus for ‘hanging,” in reference to the small tubers strung together by the fibrous roots. Rubra: from Latin, meaning “red”. The panicle of pink flowers and buds exudes her beauty in the month of June.

To some observers, one may think of cotton candy. She stands high above any prairie grasses and forbs this time of year, and your eyes can’t help but make a connection with this beauty.

I walk along parts of the Windsor Heights trail almost every day during the summer, and one of the wildflowers I’m most excited to see blooming is Yellow jewelweed (Impatiens pallida). These plants are native to most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains and thrive in wooded areas with partial shade.

According to the Illinois Wildflowers website, “Yellow Jewelweed also tolerates full sun, light shade, and mesic conditions (if it receives some protection from the afternoon sun). This species is a little more tolerant of dry conditions than Impatiens capensis (Orange Jewelweed).” Bleeding Heartland covered the orange variety of jewelweed here. I’ve usually found the orange flowers in very wet areas, such as next to a pond.

I took all of the photos enclosed below in August 2024 next to the Windsor Heights trail that runs along North Walnut Creek. There are also some colonies of yellow jewelweed farther north on the same trail in Urbandale, heading from Windsor Heights toward Walker Johnston Park.

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube.

Apparently I take Wild licorice (Glycyrrhiza lepidota) growing in my “neck of the priairie” for granted. A map on the Iowa Wildflower app indicates that wild licorice grows in 22 of Iowa’s 99 counties, mostly in western Iowa. My home county, Cerro Gordo (north central Iowa), is on the eastern edge of this species’ known locations.

I find wild licorice growing in my favorite place to look for wildflowers: Wilkinson Pioneer Park in Rock Falls.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

Mid-summer, yellow flowers start dominating the grassy field. But then prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya) shoots up sizzling rose-purple shafts of color, like big fuzzy light sabers, and steals the show.

Editor’s note from Laura Belin: This week Iowa wildflower Wednesday highlights the regal fritillary, an insect species that depends on plants native to the tallgrass prairie.

Kara Grady is a writer and plant enthusiast from eastern Iowa. Her work has been published by the Iowa Native Plant Society, Lyrical Iowa, Bleeding Heartland, and most recently by the Women, Food, & Agriculture Network. She currently lives and writes in northeast Ohio. 

With the 2024 presidential election looming large, I wanted to shift our focus to perhaps an even more serious candidacy. This candidate has lived in Iowa their whole life and is admired throughout the state. Its platform focuses on ecosystem restoration and insect education. It is one of the largest, most beautiful butterflies, whose host plant is an equally beautiful and common wildflower.

With all these credentials to its name, it may shock some people that to this day, the regal fritillary still hasn’t been named Iowa’s State Insect. There are many good reasons to do so.

Readers often tell me they appreciate Bleeding Heartland’s wildflower series as a break from the stress of following political news and the negative energy of social media. I feel the same way when I browse the hundreds of lovely photographs in the Iowa wildflower Wednesday archive.

But for a truly peaceful experience, nothing beats spending time with wildflowers in the real world. When you are stuck indoors, spending a few minutes with Iowa wildflower videos can a pretty good substitute for wandering around natural habitat.

This post features some of my favorite Iowa wildflower videos by two of Bleeding Heartland’s occasional guest authors: Bruce Morrison and Katie Byerly. Their YouTube channels (Bruce Morrison and Iowa Prairie Girl) are delightful in their own ways.

To mark this Fourth of July, I decided to create a new version of a post I compiled six years ago, when Independence Day coincided with “Iowa wildflower Wednesday.” Click on any link for more pictures and information about that plant.

Most of the photos enclosed below came from the Iowa wildflower enthusiasts Facebook group, which now has more than 10,000 members. Join us to share pictures, ask ID questions, learn about gardening with native plants, or just enjoy a break from negativity on social media. It’s a politics-free zone. I also republished some pictures by Bleeding Heartland guest authors. You can find the full wildflower archive here.

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube.

I participated in the first annual “LoHi” Loess Hills organized hike in 2021. During that adventure in the western hills of Iowa, many of us learned to shout out PENSTEMON GRANDIFLORUS!!! when someone spotted a Large-flowered Beardtongue.

Doug Chafa, one of our group leaders, taught us this. He learned it from a college professor. I wonder who taught her. She sounded like someone I would have loved to explore a prairie with. Walking the land, all the while shouting out wildflower names with excitement and enthusiasm.

I’m not good at using the scientific names of plants. I understand their importance, but I prefer the common names—or better yet, the not-so-common names. The name somebody’s great great (great?) grandmother called it centuries ago.

Radio Iowa reported on June 14 that Hancock County Weed Commissioner Jason Lackore “is sounding the alarm” after finding poison hemlock in two public areas upstream from sites where cattle producers let their animals graze.

“If it was any other plant, I wouldn’t be making such a fuss, but this plant — all parts are extremely poisonous to humans, domestic animals,” Lackore said. “And you hear a lot about livestock, cattle, ingesting small amounts. It’s fatal.”

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) is best known as an ancient method of execution, used to kill the Greek philosopher Socrates. This European native has unfortunately spread across the U.S. and is prevalent in Iowa. I see it almost every day while walking my dog. I took all of the photos enclosed below less than a mile from my home in Windsor Heights.

Bleeding Heartland’s weekly wildflower series has grown far beyond what I envisioned when I published the first Iowa wildflower Wednesday in March 2012. The search for material to publish in the spring, summer, and fall has taken me to many parks and nature preserves I’d never explored. I’ve also gotten to know some incredible guest authors and photographers, including Katie Byerly, Lora Conrad, Marla Mertz, Eileen Miller, Bruce Morrison, Diane Porter, and Leland Searles.

After the jump you’ll find the common and scientific names of more than 250 species featured here over the past twelve years. (I will update the post as needed.) The date next to each plant’s name links to a post with multiple photographs. Before my son’s interest in Jack-in-the-pulpits inspired me to start learning more about native plants in 2009, I could not have identified even a dozen of these wildflowers.

Not every Iowa wildflower Wednesday piece showcases one species. In October 2023, I created a separate page linking to every Bleeding Heartland post that surveys a range of native plants seen at one park, prairie, natural area, or trail.

Many readers have told me the wildflower posts are among their favorites at the site and provide a respite from negativity online. For those on Facebook, the Iowa wildflower enthusiasts group can be a nice timeline cleanse as well.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

So small and hiding. You could walk right past them. But look down into the long grasses, and you’ll see their tiny blue faces looking up at you.

Katie Byerly of Cerro Gordo County is also known as Iowa Prairie Girl on YouTube.

Several years ago I gave a presentation called “The Wildflowers of Wilkinson Park” at an assisted living. For one woman in her 90s, the images of Spring Cress (Cardamine bulbosa) stirred up fond memories. She was grinning from ear to ear and teary eyed as she reminisced, “We lived next to that area (before it was a park) and my mother would pick spring cress for our supper.”

I wonder now if she often thought about her mother and spring cress or if the images triggered a forgotten memory.

I’m not much of a forager, but every summer I try to pick some berries. Black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) typically flowers in Iowa in May, sometimes in early June if we had a late spring.

You can find these plants in the wild in almost every Iowa county, especially in woodland openings or near woodland edges. Keep an eye out for the shrubs while walking or bicycling on trails or roadsides. Then circle back in late June or early July to harvest what wildlife have left behind.

Illinois Wildflowers offers this tip for gardeners who want to cultivate black raspberry: “The preference is partial sun, moist to mesic conditions, and rich loamy soil. In areas that are too sunny and dry, the fruit may not develop properly without adequate rain. The canes also fail to set fruit if there is too much shade.” Although we have partial sun, we didn’t have luck growing these shrubs in our yard, probably because deer and rabbits like to eat the canes and foliage.

About ten years ago, the city of Clive did some sewer work near North Walnut Creek that destroyed my favorite area to pick black raspberries in Windsor Heights. I took all of the photos enclosed below in May or June 2023 near Colby Woods Drive, a little north of Hickman Road and not far from North Walnut Creek in Urbandale.

Diane Porter of Fairfield first published this post on My Gaia, an email newsletter “about getting to know nature” and “giving her a helping hand in our own backyards.” Diane also maintains the Birdwatching Dot Com website and bird blog.

Ohio Spiderworts (Tradescantia ohiensis) wake me up when I look out the window. Although only a few flowers are open at a time, the bright golden anthers play against their color-opposite purple petals. My eyes shimmer.

It’s a morning-only vision. Around noon the flowers close up tight. As if to say, “Come back tomorrow.” For the rest of the day, spiderworts are simply green, easy to overlook.

But next sunrise, a fresh crop of purple-petaled blossoms opens. From the center of each flower, slender columns reach up. These are the reproductive parts of the flowers.

Spring wildflowers are exploding, Iowa’s longest drought in decades is abating, and Bleeding Heartland’s wildflowers series returns today for its thirteenth year.

As grateful as I am for the rain, the warm, wet spring weather is boosting some invasive plants as well as native ones. I’ve pulled up enough garlic mustard over the past couple of weeks to fill several garbage bags, but I’ve hardly made a dent in the wooded area closest to our Windsor Heights home. Something blooming out there is triggering my spring allergies as well.

Emily Bredthauer gave me permission to publish a selection of photos she took in April and May at Margo Frankel Woods State Park in Polk County. I’m always excited to share images of a plant I’ve never seen before, and Emily was fortunate to find some naked broomrape (Orobanche uniflora), an unusual parasitic plant shown above, and in a few pictures below.

Please let me know if you would like to write a guest post for this series, either featuring one kind of plant or a selection of wildflowers seen in one location. This Iowa wildflower Wednesday archive is alphabetized by common name of the plant. Last year I compiled links to previous posts featuring many plants encountered during visits to parks, prairies, natural areas, or trails.

Before Iowa politics kicks into high gear with a new legislative session and the caucuses, I want to highlight the investigative reporting, in-depth analysis, and accountability journalism published first or exclusively on this site last year.

Some newspapers, websites, and newsletters put their best original work behind a paywall for subscribers, or limit access to a set number of free articles a month. I’m committed to keeping all Bleeding Heartland content available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. That includes nearly 500 articles and commentaries from 2023 alone, and thousands more posts in archives going back to 2007.

To receive links to everything recently published here via email, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter. I also have a free Substack, which is part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Subscribers receive occasional cross-posts from Bleeding Heartland, as well as audio files and recaps for every episode of KHOI Radio’s “Capitol Week,” a 30-minute show about Iowa politics co-hosted by Dennis Hart and me.

I’m grateful to all readers, but especially to tipsters. Please reach out with story ideas that may be worth pursuing in 2024.

Guest authors carried the load for most the twelfth year of Bleeding Heartland’s wildflowers series. Although I have been getting around pretty well (despite a catastrophic ankle fracture in early 2022), the pace of Iowa political news was relentless in 2023. In part for that reason, I spent less time on trails and prairies than I would have liked. Turning that around is on my list of New Year’s resolutions.

I can’t express how grateful I am for the outstanding contributions of guest authors and photographers. In alphabetical order: Katie Byerly, Lora Conrad, Kara Grady, Beth Lynch, Bruce Morrison, Diane Porter, Leland Searles, and Kenny Slocum. Thanks also to the friends who allowed me to publish some of their images in my own wildflower posts, and to Bleeding Heartland user PrairieFan for highlighting the devastating impact of chemical trespass on many native plants.

This series will return sometime during April or May of 2024. Please reach out if you have photographs to share, especially of native plants I haven’t featured yet. The full archive of posts featuring at least 250 wildflower species is available here. I have also compiled links to several dozen posts that covered many plants found in one area, rather than focusing on a single kind of wildflower.

For those looking for wildflower pictures year round, or seeking help with plant ID, check out the Facebook groups Flora of Iowa or Iowa wildflower enthusiasts. If you’d like a book to take with you on nature outings, Lora Conrad reviewed some of the best wildflower guides last year. A book featuring plants native to our part of the country is probably more reliable than the plant ID app on your phone.