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09/14/2026

13/100 flowers - Yellow wood sorrel.

This one’s not clover. It’s got the same three hearts, but actually comes from a different family.

Those leaflets fold up at night and in hard sun. The flower is five yellow petals with a faint red star at the center.

This one’s got a neat trick: a skinny seed pod that explodes when you touch it. Like fragments from a gr***de, that’s how it spreads itself around!

09/11/2026

12/100 flowers - Texas prickly pear.

San Antonio’s cactus. Yellow for a day, armor for the rest of the year.

The pads are stems. The long spines are the warning. The real trap is the glochids — those little brown tufts of barbed hair. They come off in your skin and stay.
The flower is all-in: a bowl of gold stamens around a green stigma. Bees work it hard. By tomorrow that bloom is spent. Deep purple-red when ripe, edible if you win the fight with the spines.

This is the plant that holds dry ground, feeds packrats and cactus wrens, and still looks like a souvenir from farther west. It isn’t. It’s home.

09/11/2026

12/100 flowers - Goldenrod.

The plant everyone blames for September sneezing. Wrong suspect.

Ragweed is the one dumping invisible pollen on the wind. Goldenrod makes heavy, sticky pollen and pays insects to carry it. Bees, wasps, butterflies, beetles — this is their late-season grocery store.

Each plume is not one flower. It’s hundreds of tiny yellow suns packed on a stem. Solidago means “to make whole.” Old herbalists used it on wounds. The plant’s real work now is holding the fall food web together.

09/10/2026

11/100 flowers - Garden verbena.

Five-petaled purple, dark eye, packed into little bouquets. This is the bedding-plant cousin of wild vervain — bred for color.

The name verbena is old: Romans used leafy twigs called verbenae in ceremonies. The garden plant is a mix of several South American species. In New England it’s usually treated as an annual.

09/10/2026

10/100 flowers - Montauk daisy

The last white daisy of the year.

Thick, glossy, saw-toothed leaves stacked up the stem. A handful of gold-eyed flowers on top. It waits until late summer and fall — after most garden daisies have quit — then lights up when the evenings go blue.

Not a wild field daisy. This one is from the coast of Japan, named for Montauk because Long Island gardeners made it famous. Tough. Salty air doesn’t bother it. Neither does a September night.

09/10/2026

9/100 flowers - White mariposa lilly

Three white sails. A purple bruise on each one. A gold beard in the middle.

This is the white one of the bunch — eurycarpus, the wide-fruit mariposa. Common in the meadows and sage openings of the Blues and Wallowas. The pointed pieces sticking out are the sepals. The broad white ones with the spots are the petals. That yellow patch is a nectar gland dressed in hairs.

The bulb fed people for a long time. The flower is the part that stops you on the trail.

The plant spends years getting ready for this one show.

09/10/2026

8/100 flowers - Arrowleaf groundsel.

Not one sunflower. A whole handful of them on a single stem.

Look at the leaves: triangular, sharply toothed, marching up the stalk almost to the flowers. That’s the “arrowleaf.” It likes wet feet — creek banks, seeps, soggy meadows in the Blues and Wallowas.

Some relatives are toxic to livestock. This one is a native of high, wet ground and a regular part of the summer gold in eastern Oregon.

Each little head has about eight yellow rays and a fuzzy gold center. Together they look like someone set a small sun on a leafy tower.

09/09/2026

7/100 flowers - Deptford pink.

Five magenta petals, each dusted with white freckles. That’s the giveaway.

It’s a wild carnation from Europe — same family as the florist’s pinks — that slipped into North America and made itself at home. In eastern Oregon you’ll find it on disturbed ground: trail edges, old roads, gravelly openings. Small plant. Huge color.

The word “pink” first meant this kind of flower, not the color. The petals are “pinked” — snipped at the edges like pinking shears.

Not rare. Not native. Still worth the crouch. Those dots look painted on.

09/09/2026

6/100 flowers - Elephant’s head.

Every flower on that spike is a miniature elephant: pink ears, dark brow, a long curved trunk. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It lives with its feet wet — seeps, snowmelt streams, soggy meadows in the Wallowas and Blues. Ferns and moss for neighbors.

It’s a lousewort. Old shepherds thought these plants gave sheep lice. They don’t. What they do is quieter and stranger: they’re hemiparasites. Green leaves for their own sugar, plus a tap into neighboring roots for extra water and minerals.

09/09/2026

5/100 - Heartleaf Arnica.

One flower. Opposite leaves. Forest shade.

This is the yellow daisy you keep seeing on mountain trails and never quite name. Leaves are heart-shaped (or close), usually in 2–3 pairs on the stem. Rays are pointed. It likes pine duff, aspen edges, and the cool side of a log.

Not a sunflower. Arnicas have opposite leaves. Most look-alikes don’t.

Old use: crushed flowers as a bruise salve. Don’t drink it. The same compounds that help a swollen knee can wreck you internally.

It spreads by underground rhizomes, so one plant becomes a little constellation of gold on the woodland floor.

Eastern Oregon native. Spring into summer.

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