• Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Blog
    • Subscribe
    • Welcome!
  • Perfectly Preserved Podcast
  • About
    • ADW Manifesto
    • Work With Me
      • Read
  • Shop
    • My Account
    • Cart
    • Checkout

The Domestic Wildflower

Handmade Food & Craft Tutorials for Beginners

  • Courses
    • Free Canning Basics
    • Everything Canning Course
    • Steam Canning Workshop
    • Free Homemade Cocktail Mixers
    • Wildflower Mixology
    • Crochet Basket Workshop
  • Can & Preserve
    • Never Canned?
    • Steam Canner Equipment Bundle
    • Shrubs Course
  • Sew
  • Cook
  • Craft
    • Crochet Step-by-Step Guides
      • Crochet Basket
      • Giant Yarn Throw
      • Thick & Thin Throw
  • Living
    • Creativity Challenge
    • Clean
    • Kids
  • Rentals
You are here: Home / Living / How to Identify Wildflowers In Your Area

How to Identify Wildflowers In Your Area

April 23, 2018 by Jenny Gomes 2 Comments

This post will share some of our favorite resources for identifying wildflowers in your area and includes both helpful apps and books that are sure to educate and inspire.

How to Identify Wildflowers

This post contains affiliate links. All opinions remain my own.

I called upon my friend Emily who is a flower enthusiast and budding flower entrepreneur (follow her lovely Instagram here!) to help me write this post. These are the tools she and other flower lovers like her use to identify flowers both while out and about and at home after a hike.

How to Identify Wildflowers with Apps

That Garden App is the go-to app on Emily’s phone. It is simple to use. Take a photo plant or butterfly, and the app brings up a list of possibilities. You confirm your matches, and the app saves all your photos so you can look back to see what you identified last week or month. And, this app opens a search page for the plant where you can learn more. This app is free and is endlessly helpful for quickly identifying the plant in front of you.

Garden Answers is another helpful app. Similar to That Garden App, it creates a photo album with results of your plant searches and helps you identify quickly the plant or flower you are seeing.

There are lots of flowers or plant ID apps out there and they all do about the same thing. Get a free one as an app is a preliminary stage in plant ID and the real investigation happens at home, with a good book. A beverage to enjoy while reading is optional but encouraged.

How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

TIP: If you have a general idea of the flower you are trying to identify (based on an app or your own previous knowledge) you can use the books mentioned to refine your definition. In one sense, the app can be used “in the field” and the book (heavier and not as portable perhaps) can be used to narrow down your results after your trek.

How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

How to Identify Wildflowers with Books

One book that is very helpful is the “Field Book of Western Wildflowers” It is organized by family (like rose, peony, dogwood, etc) and it has detailed illustrations and a thorough description to help you decide the family and name of flower you are enjoying.

 How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

“Western Garden Book” by Sunset is not only for identifying wildflowers but is a very in depth resource covering cultivation, flower identification, planting zones, growing information, water & sun information, and more. It discusses wildflowers, trees, plants, shrubs, fertilizer, lawn information, planting instructions, weed advice, etc. This is the book for a Dear Reader who has a green thumb and wants to learn more about gardening as well as plant identification. It is weighty, has beautiful photographs, and is a wealth of information.
How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!


How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

The National Geographic Pocket Guide to Wildflowers is easy to take along on your hike or picnic, has beautiful photos, and is very thorough as well. This would make a great gift for a friend and is the way you could identify a flower if you have no cell service, no storage with which to take a photo (me, 90% of the time), or a dead phone (me, 50% of the time). Sometimes technology fails us, but this little book won’t.

 How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

California Foraging is for the Wildflower reader who is interested in nibbling on the edibles afield. This resource is indispensable for identifying plants that are safe to eat. If you aren’t in California, get a book that is specific to your area.

 How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

Before you pick some wildflowers to arrange and enjoy at home, check to see if they are protected. Sometimes wildflowers are better left to grow undisturbed and in any case, snap a photo and share it on Instagram using the hashtag #thedomesticwildflower so we can see it!

If the flowers on your jaunt are more likely to be planted by man rather than the man upstairs, The Little Guides: Flowers is my favorite resource. It was given to me by my dear friend Abby years ago. She’s the one who said to me a little over a year ago, “let me build you a blog!” and I said yes and here we are. How funny it is that she gave me this way, way before I ever dreamed of having a blog called The Domestic Wildflower, back when she and I shared membership in a scholarship program, several Chico apartments, a trip to Europe, and years of friendship. She’s also a great book chooser 🙂 Grab yours by clicking the link below!

 How to Identify Wildflowers in Your Area | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this helpful post listing the apps and books you need to refer to on the hike or at home to identify wildflowers in your area!

For bouquets of wild plants that you are sure are safe and legal to collect, find what you think is beautiful and arrange it however you would like. I wrote a post here about wiring wild plants to wreaths and arranging them in metal buckets that I think you’d enjoy. Check it out!

How to Plant Your Own Grasses

If you are interested in diving into planting grasses, check out this gorgeous infographic shared from https://agreenhand.com/how-to-grow-grass-fast/ !

Please share in the comments below which resources you love for identifying plants in your area!

If you loved this post, you should read how I made homemade lilac syrup here.

Filed Under: Living

ConvertKit Form

I want to hear from you!

THE ORIGINAL Della Rose logoPlease share your thoughts and comments in the section below, Wildflowers! I love hearing from you!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Deena says

    May 16, 2016 at 7:54 pm

    National geographic pocket guide! But back when I was little I would go around with my grandma and she was my book. 🙂

    Reply
    • Jenny says

      June 4, 2016 at 6:55 pm

      Hi Deena, my Gram is really good on the ID task too 🙂

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Categories

Follow me here, there, & everywhere!

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Search

Get 10 Free Recipes Now!

Best Chicken Coop

Footer

Start Canning Course

Start Canning Course | The Domestic Wildflower click to read this super helpful list of resources, tools, and gift ideas for the homemade and handmade enthusiast in your life!
This video course will invite you into my kitchen to watch me can a wide variety of recipes and use several beginner friendly techniques. It is the perfect course if you want to learn but have no idea where to start; even if you've never boiled a pot of water! Learn how you will know you are doing it right, safety best practices, simple recipes that are foolproof and guaranteed to impress, and skills to apply to any recipe.

Shrubology Ebook

Shrubology: Refreshing Homemade Fruit and Vinegar Syrups for Cocktails
Make easy, no-cook fruit & vinegar syrups for cocktails & mocktails! This ebook shares crowd pleasing recipes and simple to understand ratios so you can make a shrub on your countertop any time- without a recipe. Dive into these Prohibition Era drinks today!

Copyright

Copyright 2019
The Domestic Wildflower
www.thedomesticwildflower.com.
All content created by Jennifer Gomes unless otherwise noted.

Copyright © 2023 · Lifestyle Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in