Monday Fun Fact Sept 14

 Nature Walk

Did you know that we have elephants feet here in Columbia, Missouri?

  LOL!  We do!  Let me explain:

Just down the road from Shepard school is Grindstone Nature Area.  I had the opportunity this past weekend to check it out, and I used the iNaturalist app to identify some of the wildflowers that are growing alongside the path.

iNaturalist is an app that you can download onto your school iPad from Self Service.  The app's icon looks like this:

Using this app, I was finding the names of many of the plants that grow here.  There are several to choose from!

 

You can see that there are many, many flowers here, so I chose one of the smallest to discover: 

This tiny little flower that hides among the big beautiful coneflowers, brown-eyed Susan's, jewelweed, and ivy is called  Leafy Elephant's-Foot.  The Missouri Department of Conservation reports that this flower is a member of the sunflower family - one of the largest flowers I know!  

image from Unsplash

The reason it is called "elephant's foot" is because its tropical "cousin" has bottom leaves large enough to suggest the feet of elephants.  So this tiny plant gets to share a name with its much larger family member - cool!

Have a great week!  I look forward to seeing you in our Zoom meetings on Wednesday!