How to identify wildflowers on a day hike with children

Sunset over spring rhododendrons in the Blue Ridge
Parkway Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina.

Among the great pleasures of day hiking during summer and spring is spotting the splashes of color on the trail from flowers that you likely usually don’t see in a landscaped setting. Oftentimes, you’ll want to know the name of a particularly beautiful wildflower that you’ve spotted or enjoy the scent of.

You can bring field guides on the hike, but spending a long time looking through them to find a flower can be frustrating and for children with you quite dull. To quickly identify wildflowers in a field guide, you’ll want to note several characteristics of the wildflower in question.

Begin by focusing on the flower itself, as many field guides arrange plants by the blossom’s color. Note these traits:
g Flower’s color
g Flower’s width
g Number of petals
g Number of flowers per stem

Next, look at the entire plant itself, noting:
g Plant’s height
g If the plant’s stem creeps/twines, if it’s hairy/spiny, or if it’s square

Then examine the plant’s leaves, noting:
g How leaves are arranged (for example, are the opposite one another or alternating)
g If the leaf’s edge is smooth, toothed or irregular
g If the leaves’ veins are parallel or branched
g If the leaves are simple (one leaf per stem) or compound (two or more leaves per stem)
g If a simple leaf, the ratio of its length to its width
g If compound leaves, if they are trifoliate, pinnate or palmate
g If the leaf has a stalk connecting it to the plant’s stem

Read more about day hiking with children in my Hikes with Tykes guidebooks.

Guidebooks: Great sources but not enough

Guidebook trail maps usually lack enough detail to be
of use on the trail. They also can be out of date.

Guidebooks are great sources of information for planning a day hike with kids. They provide a list of potential trails and usually all kinds of relevant information, such as trail lengths, sights to see along the way, and even maps.

Be forewarned, though: trails and conditions may have changed since the guidebook was published, so you don’t want to rely solely on one book for information to plan your hike. Always check online and other guidebooks to see if there’s any updated information or additional descriptions to help you become even more familiar with the trail. You’ll also almost always want to gather better maps than what a guidebook provides.

Some hikers find the information in them useful when out on the trail. While you might take kid-friendly field guides to help identify plants and animals, guidebooks about trails usually are bulky, and the first moment they get wet the pages turn moldy and curl out of shape. A guidebook is best left at home, if only to reduce the load you carry.

Bethany O., of Hood River, Ore., suggests, “If there’s information you need from a guide-book about a specific location, type it as notes and carry it with your paper maps. I usually do this for directions to the trailhead and location of key turns and landmarks to help me along the way.”

Read more about hiking navigation in my guidebook Hikes with Tykes.