Welcome to the world of Texas flowers and to the Plant Resources Center of the University of Texas at Austin! Texas has well over 5,000 species of flowering plants (more than any other state except California). The aim of this Web site is to show you some of the marvelous variation in Texas wildflowers. Included are the common and showy roadside flowers that have made the Texas spring famous (with some help from Lady Bird Johnson), but also included are the ones you might not notice or might have to search hard for. They range from the showy to the sublime, the beautiful to the bizarre, from small herbs to magnificent flowering trees and shrubs—flowers from the deep forests of East Texas, the deserts of the west, the Panhandle High Plains, subtropical South Texas, and everywhere in between.
Thus, this is not a guide to Texas wildflowers, but rather an introduction. It is also an introduction to the Plant Resources Center (PRC), which is both a museum collection and a research and teaching facility dedicated to the study of plant diversity and classification. The specimens and plant images used for this site come from the collections of the PRC, which include preserved plant specimens (herbarium specimens) collected more than 200 years ago-as well as others just collected this year-and photographic images of Texas plants from 50 years ago from the Dexter Collection. The site enables you to look up specific wildflowers (185 species are covered), see a slide show of selected species from the historical images collection, take a behind-the-scenes video tour of the PRC, and read more about the PRC's history and research. We hope you enjoy your visit with us.
