Last spring, I made a weeklong trip to southeast Missouri, near the “bootheel” area of the state. Although I am a lifelong resident of Missouri, I had never been to this area. Why? Probably the #1 reason is the difficulty of getting to this area. No, not really difficult … just takes a long time. Living in the western-central part of the state (just south of Kansas City), there are no high-speed, direct roads from my area to the southeast. Either I must travel the “backroads” in a diagonal line, or first go south, then turn east. Either way, it is several hours to get there. But I decided it was time to venture into this area.
One objective of the trip was to find and photograph wildflowers. Fortunately, I was able to find many wildflowers on this trip and many of them were “lifers” for me. The wildflower I’m featuring today is one such “lifer”, the Miami Mist (Phacelia purshii), which is a very beautiful wildflower and one that I had not heard of before the trip. Here are a few images of this wildflower.
A photo of the entire plant:
A close-up of a branch of this plant, with flowers:
And a close-up of a single flower:
This beauty grows only in the southeast and east-central parts of Missouri, growing in wooded lowlands, streamsides, and other moist areas (I found these growing along a trail from the parking lot to the shut-ins). The plant is a spreading plant, growing 12″-18″ tall. The 5-lobed flowers can be light blue-violet or whitish in color. The leaf stems and stems in general, have soft hairs. All in all, a nice plant to add to my list!
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