We break the various wildflowers down into four seasons: spring, early summer, late summer, and fall. The spring flowers are fading and we are now in the season of early summer, and there are some great flowers that are beginning to bloom. All of these photos were taken today, June 24th, in a prairie that was seeded four years ago.
Perhaps the most dramatic early summer wildflower is the Butterfly Milkweed. It's one of the very few orange native wildflowers and of course is a great pollinator. With it you see the Purple Prairie Clover, another very nice early summer flower.
Of the yellow flowers, the Oxe Eye Daisy has much brilliance and size. You can see some Purple Coneflowers behind them, but still pale in color.
Hyssop is a very nice lavender colored flower and is a very long-blooming plant, beginning in late June and continuing until late August.
Common Milkweed is in the same family as Butterfly Milkweed, but they are quite different in appearance. The Swamp Milkweed's mauve color adds something to the mix.
Even though it is not colorful yet, I thought I would include this photo of a Compass Plant. They are larger plants that have anise flower in later summer.
I thought I would include two ubiquitous weeds of early summer: Hoary Alyssum (the white one), and Goat's Beard (the yellow one). They show up when soil is disturbed, such as when a new prairie is seeded. This prairie plot was seeded last spring. Tilling the soil brought up a host of these weeds, which we often see in first and especially second year prairies. These two plants will decline next year in these spots as both are annuals (that is, they live for just one year).