Plants Archives - Heartland Safari

Like its larger red cousin, White Clover blooms with balls of tiny white flowers. By far most of the leaves of this legume have three leaflets, but about one in ten thousand has four.

Lucky Shamrock: White Clover

Updated September 7, 2026

Have you ever seen a four-leaf clover growing wild? If so, you are considered one of the lucky ones. You are one out of 10,000 folks. That doesn’t count the four- and five-leaf clover plants you can buy with their genetic modifications. Are we trying to create our own luck here? In the natural setting, […]

Plants

Balls comprising dozens of tiny red-pink flowers sit atop upright stems of Red Clover. Foliage of this important forage species is made up with leaves of three leaflets each.

Not just a pretty face: Red Clover

Updated September 7, 2026

Red clover, (Trifolium pratense), those sweet-smelling perennials that grow on Owl Acres, offer something more than their pretty flowers to the landscape. They offer nitrogen. Nitrogen is one of the crucial building blocks of life. Living things use it to build DNA, RNA, amino acids, and most living tissue. Nitrogen Is all around us in […]

Plants

A pale purple, daisy-like flower tops one of about a dozen separate stalks on Woodland Lettuce.

Salad Greens: Woodland Lettuce

Updated August 23, 2026

Lettuce, in my experience, comes in heads, wrapped in plastic from the grocery store. Or maybe in bags with a few other veggies. But here’s another kind of lettuce. It’s six feet tall and has a spray of pretty blue flowers at the top. It’s growing up in the shade right next to a walnut […]

Plants

Pea-size, snow-white, pearl-shaped flowers bloom in profusion atop wild quinine in the Owl Acres Prairie Garden.

Tonic, Anyone?: Wild Quinine

Updated August 16, 2026

I have a glass of tonic water to slake my thirst on a hot and muggy summer day. It has that bitterness that I like. The bitterness comes from its signature ingredient—quinine. Quinine, historically, was used by the indigenous tribes of Ecuador and Peru as an antimalarial long before the Spanish and the Jesuits invaded […]

Plants

What’s as uniform, or as boring, or as soft and luxurious underfoot, as Kentucky Bluegrass? Not much else to say, is there?

Grass Part 3: Kentucky Bluegrass

Updated July 16, 2026

The third type of grass on Owl Acres is Kentucky Bluegrass (Poa pratensis). It is by far the most prevalent, filling all of the meadow area on Owl Acres with its short thick carpet. It’s the grass we all know and love in our yards, lawns, golf courses, parks and everywhere else we want a […]

Plants

Tawny, chevron-shaped panicles of orchard grass fill the frame of this close up image. The distinctive shape of the seed heads is the easiest way to identify this soft, fine-bladed forage species.

Grass, Part 2: Orchard Grass

Updated July 16, 2026

Orchard grass, (Dactylis glomerata) is another species of grass found on Owl Acres. It can grow up to four feet tall. On Owl Acres it grows at the edges of fence rows and has to be trimmed around the house and other obstacles. It’s called cat grass because cats like to chew it, and it’s […]

Plants

Loose collections of seeds lean out from the top of a long stem of grass. Smooth Brome Grass stands in front of a barn-red outbuilding on Owl Acres. This is one of the main forage grasses on the place.

Grass Part 1: Smooth Brome Grass

Updated July 5, 2026

Grass. How ordinary, unremarkable, and everywhere! Owl Acres has about four acres of grass. Now that the mower is fixed, it gets mowed every week or two. Bryan sets the mower high in an effort to avoid mowing the snakes that live deep in the grass. But the grass itself—what do we know about it? […]

Plants

Snow white, 6-petaled flowers with yellow centers smile up from the green jumble of species that make the yard of Owl Acres. Star-of-Bethlehem, Bird’s Milk or any of several other names, the inch-wide blooms were among the first to appear in mid-May.

Legends shining in the grass: Star-of-Bethlehem or Bird’s milk

Updated June 17, 2026

Along the edges of our prairie garden, we noticed some tiny, pure white star-shaped flowers. They were only a few inches high, and stood out against the green of the emerging grass. The flowers have a variety of names. Some describe the flower’s setting—summer snowflake, star flower, grass lily, or snow drop. others describe what […]

Plants

Just out the window is Karen’s Study Garden. It sports a chaotic mess of species (might call them weeds). The charm of this little plot is that each spring, a different plant finds its ideal conditions and becomes profuse. This year, the star of this unscripted show is Field Pennycress. Next year it will be something else and we don’t have any idea what it will be.

Old Weed or New Crop: Field Pennycress

Updated May 24, 2026

In mid-April, I noticed an unfamiliar plant growing in the garden outside my study window. Its name, I discovered, was field pennycress (Thlaspi arvense). It is a member of the mustard family and is generally considered a weed, but, who knew, it is getting a new reputation in some places. It may become a crop […]

Plants

Karen’s Ostrich Ferns growing along the north side of the house on Owl Acres. Because of its location, this image can only be captured from mid spring to mid fall when the morning sun is far enough into the northern sky to shine directly onto these shade tolerant plants.

Landscaping Success: Ostrich Ferns

Updated May 17, 2026

About 20 years ago my friend Lisa gave me some starter ostrich ferns (Matteuccia struthiopteris, also known as fiddlehead fern or shuttlecock fern). I planted them on the north side of the house. They have survived the dogs and the rabbits, and are growing in lush patches filling in between the air conditioner and the […]

Plants