Wildflowers
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50 free Wildflowers trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wildflowers are the plants nobody planted: the roadside, meadow and woodland flowers that seed themselves and get on with it. They are also full of stories. One gave a famous medicine its name, another inspired a fastener found on shoes and jackets, and several have served as dyes, poisons and battlefield remedies. This quiz covers the wildflowers people most often ask about: official state and provincial flowers, the meanings hidden in common and scientific names, the insects and birds that pollinate them, the parks and deserts famous for their blooms, and the odd survival tricks of plants that make their own heat, steal from their neighbors or wait years for rain. Questions range across North America, Britain, southern Africa, the Himalayas and Australia. It suits gardeners, hikers, naturalists and anyone learning to tell one wild bloom from another, and it works for a classroom, a garden club or a nature walk. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing a little more about the flowers at your feet.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which household painkiller is named after Spiraea, the old botanical name of the meadow wildflower meadowsweet?
Aspirin
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.
Q 02Hooked seed heads from which common wildflower stuck to engineer George de Mestral's dog and inspired Velcro?
Burdock
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.
Q 03Queen Anne's lace, a lacy white wildflower of roadsides and fields, is the wild form of which garden vegetable?
Carrot
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.
Q 04Which president's wife championed the Highway Beautification Act and co-founded a wildflower center near Austin?
Lady Bird Johnson
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.
Q 05Which poisonous white-flowered roadside plant supplied the drink used to execute the Greek philosopher Socrates?
Hemlock
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.
Q 06Monarch butterfly caterpillars depend on which wildflower, whose toxins make the insects taste foul to predators?
Milkweed
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.
Q 07Which late-summer wildflower, often wrongly blamed for hay fever, did Thomas Edison breed as a source of rubber?
Goldenrod
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.
Q 08Yarrow's genus name honors which Greek hero, said to have carried the wildflower to treat his soldiers' battle wounds?
Achilles
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.
Q 09In which Shakespeare comedy does juice from the wild pansy, dripped on sleeping eyelids, make characters fall in love?
A Midsummer Night's Dream
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.
Q 10Which US state's official flower is a golden-orange poppy whose petals close up every night?
California
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.
Q 11Which wildflower, a kind of lupine, is the official state flower of Texas?
Bluebonnet
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.
Q 12Which US state has protected its state flower, the blue-and-white Rocky Mountain columbine, by law since 1925?
Colorado
Colorado adopted the flower in 1899, and its species name, coerulea, is botanical Latin for sky blue.
Q 13Which white woodland wildflower is both Ontario's floral emblem and the official state wildflower of Ohio?
Trillium
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.
Q 21Which hooded woodland wildflower of eastern North America can switch from male to female as it grows larger?
Jack-in-the-pulpit
Jack-in-the-pulpit bears mostly male flowers while small, adds female ones as it grows, and ends up producing only female flowers.
Q 22Which early-blooming wetland wildflower of eastern North America makes enough heat to melt through frozen ground?
Skunk cabbage
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.
Q 23Cardinal flower, a vibrant red wildflower of summer and fall, depends mainly on which pollinators to set seed?
Hummingbirds
Q 14Which yellow wildflower, Maryland's state flower, is imitated in the blanket draped over the Preakness Stakes winner?
Black-eyed Susan
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.
Q 15Which tall pink wildflower, Yukon's floral emblem, was nicknamed bombweed for colonizing craters in wartime Britain?
Fireweed
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.
Q 16Elizabethans stiffened their ruffs with starch from the bulbs of which wildflower that carpets Britain's ancient woods?
Bluebell
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.
Q 17Which yellow lawn wildflower ripens into a fluffy round seed head that children call a clock and blow apart?
Dandelion
Dandelion seeds each hang beneath a parachute of fine hairs called a pappus, which lets the wind carry them over long distances.
Q 18Drops made from which poisonous wildflower were reputedly used by Renaissance women to enlarge the pupils of their eyes?
Deadly nightshade
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.
Q 19The Great Smokies, sometimes called the Wildflower National Park, straddle North Carolina and which other state?
Tennessee
Tennessee shares a park with more than 1,500 kinds of flowering plants, more than any other national park in North America.
Q 20Which red wildflower, Wyoming's state flower, taps the roots of neighboring grasses to steal water and nutrients?
Indian paintbrush
Indian paintbrush gets its color from brightly colored bracts, modified leaves that partly hide the true flowers tucked inside.
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.
Q 24Red clover, Vermont's state flower, is prized by farmers for enriching soil with which element taken from the air?
Nitrogen
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.
Q 25Meadow buttercup wildflowers carry nectar guides that bees can see but people cannot, visible only in which light?
Ultraviolet
Ultraviolet patterns give the flowers a darker center, a bullseye that points visiting insects to where the nectar is kept.
Q 26Which term describes a wildflower, such as the foxglove, that grows only leaves in year one and flowers in year two?
Biennial
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.
Q 27Scientists regrew a 32,000-year-old Siberian wildflower from fruit buried in permafrost by which Ice Age animals?
Ground squirrels
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.
Q 28What do botanists call woodland wildflowers that emerge, bloom and die back before the trees above them leaf out?
Spring ephemerals
Spring ephemerals use the few weeks when full sunlight still reaches the forest floor, then go dormant underground by May or June.
Q 29The name of the lupine, a wildflower perhaps once blamed for ruining soil, comes from the Latin for which animal?
Wolf
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.
Q 30The purple coneflower's genus name, Echinacea, comes from the Greek word for which animal, a nod to its spiny center?
Hedgehog
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.