Although I was in a hurry to get to the farmers market two Saturdays ago, I had to pull off the bike trail to get a closer look at the bright yellow flowers near the bank of Walnut Creek. They turned out to be Lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata), a new find for me. Sometimes known as sand coreopsis or lanceleaf tickseed, this species is native to most of the U.S. and Canada. UPDATE: Bleeding Heartland user Prairie Fan notes in the comments that The Vascular Plants of Iowa, a classic text by Lawrence Eilers and Dean Roosa, identifies lanceleaf coreopsis as a native of the U.S. but not Iowa.
Like other members of the aster family, what looks like one flower is a group of ray flowers (which resemble petals) surrounding a center disc containing many tiny flowers. The ragged tips of the ray flowers set lanceleaf coreopsis apart from most other related species, except for large-flowered coreopsis. I’m grateful to ecological consultant and photographer Leland Searles, who looked at my pictures and confirmed the ID as lanceolata plants, based on the leaves.
Wendie Schneider took the picture at the top of this post in Story County, along with a few other photographs below. The rest of the images are my shots of the colony near the Walnut Creek trail, close to the border between Des Moines and Windsor Heights.