Minnesota Wildflowers

A site about plants growing in the wild in Minnesota, with a focus on identification, focusing on, but not limited to flowers.

Website: https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info

Minnesota Wildflowers is a website about all plants that grow in the wild in Minnesota; although the name suggests a focus on wildflowers, it covers a variety of other types of plants including trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, and graminoids (grasses, sedges and rushes.) It is a work-in-progress, aiming to eventually cover all plant species occurring in Minnesota, and as of September of 2023 covering over 1,700 of thes species, only a few hundred short of the goal.

Minnesota Wildflowers was founded in March, 2007 by Katy Chayka, and is incorporated as a non-profit. Until 2020 Peter Dziuk was also a major contributor to the site, contributing primarily photographs. Minnesota Wildflowers has an extremely minimal budget relative to the incredible resource it represents, and is primarily funded by donations, also receiving a small amount of money through advertising. The advertising uses direct sponsorship, primarily by businesses that focus on locally-native plants and ecological restoration, and the site does not use any generic online ad networks.

The site has a page for each plant, which has detailed information on identification, usually accompanied by multiple photos showing the various parts of each plant used in ID. There is some, but minimal information on habitat and life cycle. In addition to the plant pages, Minnesota Wildflowers allows listing of flowers by color and by bloom time, which can be helpful in narrowing down lists for ID. There is also a glossary.

Minnesota Wildflowers also has its own categories for invasive plants, which are separated into invasive - ERADICATE, for the most ecologically-dangerous species, and the less-serious weedy / non-native category for plants that are introduced and weedy, and may be important to remove on some sites, but are not as universally dangerous to ecosystems. These distinctions are valuable and are often glossed-over by many authorities, who either lump together all invasives as equally serious, or who ignored the less-damaging (but still somewhat damaging) introduced plants.

The site also allows the posting of comments, which are moderated before being posted, and some pages have discussion about the plant.