Bayou City W.A.T.E.R. Project

Wild Flowers, Plants, Grasses, & Trees

The Texas Gulf Coast area is home to a variety of wetlands such as saline, brackish, intermediate, and fresh marsh wetlands. 

In a saline marsh you will find mostly smooth cordgrass.  Other plants include blackrush, saline marsh aster, saltwort, glasswort and sea-lavender.  

Brackish marsh wetland communities are the most commonly found communities in the Glaveston Bay system, which are typically  transitional between saline and intermediate marshes.  Common plant species include marshhay cordgrass, saltgrass, saltmarsh bulrush, marsh hemp and hairypod cowpea.  

Intermediate marshes support a greater plant diversity than the saline and brackish marsh wetland communities.  Plant species that are commonly found in this environment include seashore paspalum, marshhay cordgrass, Olney bulrush, Colorado River hemp, common reedgrass, coastal water-hyssop, bearded sprangletop, and cattail.  

Fresh marshes are home to the greatest diversity in plant species of all wetland marsh types.  Common plant species include paillefine, giant cutgrass, American lotus, white water-lily, smartweed, marsh millet, arrowhead, seedbox, cattail, alligator weed, and many others.

Site offers an introduction to tree types. Information is also available about ash, beech, birch, elm, oak and sycamore trees. 

This site allows you to find the plant or tree that you're looking for by type, or you can search for it by name.

This is a wonderful site!  You can look up wildflowers based on type or you can search for a particular flower.

Don't know what a plant or flower looks like?  This is a wonderful library of 64 beautiful photographs to help you identify a variety of flora and fauna indigenous to the Houston area.

You can access data lists plant species that can be found in a wetland environment.  This site also offers training on how to identify plant species, software, and tons of links.  If you have the time, take a look at the National Wetlands Status and Trends Study and Report for the year 2000.

A wonderful site with information and photos of thousand of plants.  Be sure to check out the Wetland Indicator Status where you can access data for a particular region.

A USDA - Soil Conservation Service site that offers a Southern Wetland Flora guide in the form of a .zip file.

This site is sponsored by Texas Parks and Wildlife.  It has quite a few scientific sketches of wildlife plants found in Texas.  Very good site for plant identification.

Identify trees by leaf type, fruit or name.

This is a great links site for finding information on wildflowers.  You can spend a lot of time surfing all of the links found here.  It's wonderful!  Be sure to check out the site titled, Wildflowers in Texas.