Perennial

Field bindweed is a climbing or creeping vine that dies back each year. Its name derives from the way it binds or coils around other plants. The stems grow one to six feet long. The one- to two-inch-long leaves are spirally arranged and arrowhead-shaped.

Bastard toadflax grows in clumps up to a foot tall, and has smooth alternating leaves from a quarter to an inch and a half long. The tiny flower starts as a tight little ball which opens up into a star formed by the five sepals. There are no petals. Blossoms remain open night and day for two days.

Dusty maidens have a highly branched stem up to two feet tall with a compact cluster of one to five inch long leaves at the base. The branches are tipped with white or tan flowers that look like pompoms. These flower heads are made up of tubular white flowers in a dense round cluster.

Thompson’s paintbrush is not a colorful plant, unlike other paintbrushes. The yellow to green “flowers” are actually modified leaves hiding the inconspicuous tubular flowers. The petals fuse into a narrow, elongate tube. The stems are in clusters and usually grow four to sixteen inches tall. Short white hairs cover the stems and leaves.

In the Sage Hills, whitetop often forms a sea of sweet-smelling white flowers. Whitetop grows upright from a single stem eight to twenty inches tall. The flower head is typically flat-topped and dense with white flowers. Flowers have four widely-spaced petals.

Sagebrush mariposa lily is showy and grows up to two feet tall, with a beautiful tulip-like flower that displays petals, sepals and stamens in multiples of three. Each plant has one to three flowers, and the lavender petals are pointed at the tip, with a darker violet band at the base.

This small lily grows from a bulb and has one to several white flowers with petals, sepals and stamens in multiples of three. The hairy-edged petals look like a cat’s ear with a purple “eyebrow” at its base.

This low-growing, cushion-like plant has white, pink, or purple flowers that mature and produce distinctive white woolly seed pods. The stems are only two to four inches long. The leaves are the gray-green color of sagebrush. Like all legumes, locoweed helps to fix nitrogen in the soil.

Russian knapweed grows up to three feet tall with considerably branched stems. Leaves up to six inches long and one and a half inches wide grow near the base of the plant and become smaller toward the top. The small half-inch flower heads on the branch tips may be white, pink, or lavender-blue.

Yarrow has one to several tall upright stems up to three feet tall, narrow fern-like leaves clustered at the base but found on the stem as well, and flat umbrella-shaped clusters of dense white flowers. One of its main characteristics is the odor of the crushed leaves--a strong aromatic herb rather like rosemary and sage.