Wild Plants With Tiny Flowers
This is a collection of plants with tiny flowers that I have found in my zone 6 garden.
Table of Contents
Common Whitlow Grass
A winter annual, this wildflower’s botanical name is Draba verna. I don’t consider it drab!
The foliage stays low to the ground with flower stems that shoot up with small clusters of tiny white flowers.
It grows between the spaces in my sandstone walkway where the soil has a lot of clay and somewhat compacted.
This little wildflower is one of the earliest that blooms in the spring and then dies during the summer.
I would love to have a planter full of this on my porch to walk by since it is such an early bloomer.
Corn Speedwell
This low-growing plant is considered a weed and grows all across the United States. It has tiny bright blue flowers with a white throat.
It also grows between the spaces of my sandstone walkway during warm winters and early spring. I usually just leave it be because as summer comes along with hotter temperatures, it dies out.
It’s botanical name is Veronica arvensis and other common names are rock speedwell, common speedwell and wall speedwell. The names give you a clue where it’s often found.
It is considered a winter annual but I brought one in the house to see how long it would live. (It died because I forgot to water it!)
What is a Winter Annual? A winter annual is a plant that starts its growing season in the fall and usually dies the next summer. These types of plants are also called cool-season plants.
Gill Over The Ground
I do not have enough bad words to say about this plant with its cute tiny purple flowers. Ground ivy, Creeping Charlie, or Run-Away-Robin, no matter what you call it, it’s a massively fast spreader.
It does stay low to the ground and very easy to pull out but being a member of the mint family, it lives up to mint’s reputation, and then some!
Glechoma hederacea is a perennial edible for humans but is toxic for cows, pigs, and horses.
I will be giving it a try as a tea along with some other plants this summer.
Chickweed
It’s April and this Chickweed is just starting to grow. Most of the images you see online are of much larger plants showing a lot more vegetation. I had a little trouble distinguishing this from Thyme-leaf Sandwort because I did not realize there were 2 varieties of Chickweed. This is Mouse Ear Chickweed, Cerastium vulgatum, a perennial.
The tiny flowers are what give it away though. Chickweed’s flowers look like they have 10 petals but they do not. There are 5 with very deep lobed petals. Thyme-leaf Sandwort flowers have 5 petals and look like a star.
Hairy Bittercress
This is a very poor example of Hairy Bittercress because there are barely any leaves. If a weed is doing poorly it’s probably a good indication of how poor the soil is.
Cardamine hirsuta is considered invasive. It hasn’t been a huge problem in my yard though, only pops up in areas where the soil is poor.
The tiny white flowers are just starting to show their color on the upper left stem. The long tapered seedpods help identify it.
