WILD GERANIUM
STREAM VIOLET
WOODLAND PHLOX
Taking a walk through the woods behind our house has to be one of the most peaceful activities for me. The wildflowers that I see are precious and we try not to pick too many of them since we want them to thrive there. This is VERY hard for a certain 4 yr old girl. She could wipe out the entire ecosystem in one walk around our trail. I do let her pick a few here and there but try to explain to her that we want the flowers to keep coming back year after year. It’s hard enough to keep what we have with all of the invasive bush honeysuckle that we have crowding out most native plants and flowers. I recently found this great resource for identifying many of the flowers and edible plants that we have growing in the woods and in our own backyard. It’s called Edible Wild Food and it has great images of plants and flowers that are edible and easily found in the wild. They also have some recipes and great tips on foraging. We have a huge variety to explore and try. I guess that’s one great thing about letting our backyard get wildly overgrown. I’m very slowly figuring out what to keep and what to pull out. We use no chemicals so this is a tedious project that consumes me once spring hits. The photos I took above are just a few non-edible wildflowers we have but some edibles we’ve discovered are lambs quarter, mullein, wild bee balm, wild violet, sweet rocket, goldenrod, and yarrow, and of course dandelion. You may also like this previous post with many resources for native wildflowers.
Take a peaceful walk and see what you can discover, but watch out for this!!
Julie
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