50 Fun Facts About Wildflowers

Which household painkiller is named after Spiraea, the old botanical name of the meadow wildflower meadowsweet?

Aspirin borrows the middle of its name from Spiraea, because salicylic acid, the drug's chemical starting point, was extracted from meadowsweet in the 1830s.

Hooked seed heads from which common wildflower stuck to engineer George de Mestral's dog and inspired Velcro?

Burdock burrs end in tiny hooks that grab fur and fabric, and the Swiss engineer copied them with one strip of hooks and one of soft loops.

Queen Anne's lace, a lacy white wildflower of roadsides and fields, is the wild form of which garden vegetable?

Carrot crops belong to the very same species, Daucus carota, and the pale wild root is edible while young but soon turns too woody to eat.

Which president's wife championed the Highway Beautification Act and co-founded a wildflower center near Austin?

Lady Bird Johnson lobbied so hard for the 1965 law that it was nicknamed Lady Bird's Bill, and the Texas center she founded with actress Helen Hayes now carries her name.

Which poisonous white-flowered roadside plant supplied the drink used to execute the Greek philosopher Socrates?

Hemlock is toxic in every part, the seeds and roots most of all, and it still grows wild on roadsides and at the edges of fields.

Monarch butterfly caterpillars depend on which wildflower, whose toxins make the insects taste foul to predators?

Milkweed is named for the milky latex that oozes from any damaged stem or leaf, and that sap carries the heart-affecting compounds the caterpillars take in.

Which late-summer wildflower, often wrongly blamed for hay fever, did Thomas Edison breed as a source of rubber?

Goldenrod naturally contains rubber, and Edison's breeding produced a 12-foot plant that yielded as much as 12 percent; the real hay fever culprit is wind-pollinated ragweed.

Yarrow's genus name honors which Greek hero, said to have carried the wildflower to treat his soldiers' battle wounds?

Achilles gives the genus its name, Achillea, and in antiquity yarrow was known as herba militaris, the military herb, for stanching the flow of blood.

In which Shakespeare comedy does juice from the wild pansy, dripped on sleeping eyelids, make characters fall in love?

A Midsummer Night's Dream calls the flower love-in-idleness, and Oberon says it was white until one of Cupid's arrows struck it and turned it purple.

Which US state's official flower is a golden-orange poppy whose petals close up every night?

California pictures the poppy on its highway welcome signs, and botanist Sara Plummer Lemmon campaigned for it through the 1890s before writing the bill herself.

Which wildflower, a kind of lupine, is the official state flower of Texas?

Bluebonnet petals are shaped like the sun hats pioneer women once wore, and several Texas lupines share the name and are collectively the state flower.

Which US state has protected its state flower, the blue-and-white Rocky Mountain columbine, by law since 1925?

Colorado adopted the flower in 1899, and its species name, coerulea, is botanical Latin for sky blue.

Which white woodland wildflower is both Ontario's floral emblem and the official state wildflower of Ohio?

Trillium seeds carry a chemical that makes ants haul them home as if they were food, planting new colonies up to about 10 meters away.

Which yellow wildflower, Maryland's state flower, is imitated in the blanket draped over the Preakness Stakes winner?

Black-eyed Susan blooms too late for the May race, so the winner's blanket is made of chrysanthemums chosen to look like the real thing.

Which tall pink wildflower, Yukon's floral emblem, was nicknamed bombweed for colonizing craters in wartime Britain?

Fireweed is a pioneer plant that floods onto ground cleared by forest blazes, peaks about five years later, then gives way as trees and brush return.

Elizabethans stiffened their ruffs with starch from the bulbs of which wildflower that carpets Britain's ancient woods?

Bluebell woods are a British specialty: Britain and Ireland may hold up to half of all the common bluebells in the world, and UK law protects the plant.

Which yellow lawn wildflower ripens into a fluffy round seed head that children call a clock and blow apart?

Dandelion seeds each hang beneath a parachute of fine hairs called a pappus, which lets the wind carry them over long distances.

Drops made from which poisonous wildflower were reputedly used by Renaissance women to enlarge the pupils of their eyes?

Deadly nightshade owes its species name, bella-donna, Italian for beautiful woman, to that cosmetic reputation; its drops block the eye muscles that shrink the pupil.

The Great Smokies, sometimes called the Wildflower National Park, straddle North Carolina and which other state?

Tennessee shares a park with more than 1,500 kinds of flowering plants, more than any other national park in North America.

Which red wildflower, Wyoming's state flower, taps the roots of neighboring grasses to steal water and nutrients?

Indian paintbrush gets its color from brightly colored bracts, modified leaves that partly hide the true flowers tucked inside.

Which hooded woodland wildflower of eastern North America can switch from male to female as it grows larger?

Jack-in-the-pulpit bears mostly male flowers while small, adds female ones as it grows, and ends up producing only female flowers.

Which early-blooming wetland wildflower of eastern North America makes enough heat to melt through frozen ground?

Skunk cabbage can run 15 to 35 degrees Celsius warmer than the air, enough to melt a ring of ice around itself, and its bruised leaves smell like its namesake.

Cardinal flower, a vibrant red wildflower of summer and fall, depends mainly on which pollinators to set seed?

Hummingbirds, chiefly the ruby-throated species, do most of the work, while the plant's blue cousin, the great blue lobelia, is pollinated mainly by bees.

Red clover, Vermont's state flower, is prized by farmers for enriching soil with which element taken from the air?

Nitrogen fixed by red clover raises soil fertility, which is why the plant is widely grown as a fodder crop; Denmark has also used it as a national flower.

Meadow buttercup wildflowers carry nectar guides that bees can see but people cannot, visible only in which light?

Ultraviolet patterns give the flowers a darker center, a bullseye that points visiting insects to where the nectar is kept.

Which term describes a wildflower, such as the foxglove, that grows only leaves in year one and flowers in year two?

Biennial plants like the foxglove spend year one as a low rosette of leaves, then send up a flowering stem 1 to 2 meters tall, set seed and die.

Scientists regrew a 32,000-year-old Siberian wildflower from fruit buried in permafrost by which Ice Age animals?

Ground squirrels cached the fruit right at the permafrost level, so it froze almost at once and stayed frozen until researchers dug out the burrows by the Kolyma River.

What do botanists call woodland wildflowers that emerge, bloom and die back before the trees above them leaf out?

Spring ephemerals use the few weeks when full sunlight still reaches the forest floor, then go dormant underground by May or June.

The name of the lupine, a wildflower perhaps once blamed for ruining soil, comes from the Latin for which animal?

Wolf is lupus in Latin, yet the plant has long been valued for improving sandy soil, and its seeds were eaten around the Mediterranean in ancient times.

The purple coneflower's genus name, Echinacea, comes from the Greek word for which animal, a nod to its spiny center?

Hedgehog is ekhinos in Greek, a word that also covered the sea urchin, and botanist Conrad Moench chose it because the cone turns prickly as its seeds ripen.

The aster, a daisy-like wildflower that blooms into late fall, takes its name from the Greek word for which sky object?

Star is aster in Greek, a name given for the flower's radiating head, and the same root gives English the words asterisk, asteroid and astronaut.

Which wildflower, also known as the prairie crocus or wind flower, is the official state flower of South Dakota?

Pasqueflower is also called the Easter flower, a name tied to the Passover and Easter season when it blooms, and the plant is toxic.

Which wildflower, a self-seeding regular in lawns, is the state flower of Illinois, New Jersey and Wisconsin?

Violet plants are what fritillary butterfly caterpillars depend on for food, so a weedy patch in a lawn doubles as a butterfly nursery.

Which wild orchid, Minnesota's state flower, takes many years to grow from seed to its first bloom?

Lady's slipper pods can each release more than 50,000 seeds, yet so few germinate that even Charles Darwin failed to raise the showy species.

Which insect-trapping bog wildflower, once shown on a penny, is the floral emblem of Newfoundland and Labrador?

Pitcher plant traps catch fewer than 1 percent of the insects that visit them, and the flower appeared on Newfoundland's own one-cent coins before the province made it the floral emblem in 1954.

Which Canadian province, whose licence plates picture the flower, has the prickly wild rose as its floral emblem?

Alberta's emblem, Rosa acicularis, grows right around the north of the globe in Asia, Europe and North America, and its red hips stay on the stems through winter.

Which semi-desert region on South Africa's Atlantic coast erupts in wildflowers every August and September?

Namaqualand's flower season opens with the arrival of Namakwa daisies after the winter rains, and the blooming of purple vygies signals that it is nearly over.

Valley of Flowers National Park, part of a World Heritage Site of alpine meadows, lies in which country's Himalayas?

India set up the park in 1982 in Uttarakhand, half a century after three British mountaineers lost their way coming off Mount Kamet and stumbled into the valley.

Which white woodland wildflower of eastern North America oozes a bright orange-red sap that was once used as a dye?

Bloodroot is a member of the poppy family, and Native American basketmakers of the Southeast have used its reddish sap to color rivercane.

Which orange North American wildflower is nicknamed touch-me-not because its ripe seed pods burst at a light touch?

Jewelweed pods have five valves that coil back in an instant and fling the seeds away, a trick botanists call explosive dehiscence.

Which blue-flowered wildflower, the wild form of radicchio, has roots that are baked and ground as a coffee substitute?

Chicory also goes by blue sailors and wild endive, and cultivated forms of the very same species are sold as Belgian endive.

Which yellow wildflower, long used as a herbal remedy for depression, takes its name from a feast day in late June?

St John's wort was gathered around the saint's feast on 24 June, when its healing and magical powers were believed to be at their strongest.

Which naturalist is honored in the scientific name of the twinflower, his favorite wildflower?

Carl Linnaeus, founder of modern species naming, called it his favorite plant, and the twinflower is now the provincial flower of Småland, the Swedish region where he grew up.

Which red-and-green wildflower, found wild only in Western Australia, has been that state's floral emblem since 1960?

Kangaroo paw has twice featured on Australian stamps, first in 1962 floating over a view of Perth and again in a 1968 series on state floral emblems.

Which wildflower do conservationists sow to restore meadows because it weakens grasses that crowd out other flowers?

Yellow rattle is a half-parasite that taps the roots of grasses and legumes, which is why farmers have long considered it a pest.

Which pink wildflower, eaten by explorer Meriwether Lewis and scientifically named for him, is Montana's state flower?

Bitterroot gave its name to a Montana valley, river and mountain range, and botanist Frederick Pursh named the plant Lewisia from specimens the explorer brought back.

Primrose Day, once marked each 19 April with his reputed favorite wildflower, honored which British prime minister?

Benjamin Disraeli received bunches of primroses from Queen Victoria, who sent a wreath of them to his funeral in 1881, and admirers wore the flowers each year into the 1920s.

Which prickly wildflower became Scotland's emblem after, legend says, a barefoot Norse raider trod on one and cried out?

Thistle legend is often linked to the Battle of Largs in 1263, and the flower was appearing on Scottish silver coins by the 1470s.

Which woolly white wildflower of the high Alps appears on Austria's two-cent euro coin?

Edelweiss wears a coat of dense hairs that protects it from cold and drought, and Austria's one-cent and five-cent coins show a gentian and an alpine primrose.

Buttercups belong to the genus Ranunculus, a Late Latin word meaning a little version of which water-loving animal?

Frog is rana in Latin, and the name suits a genus that also includes the water crowfoots, which grow in still or running water.