Identify the Flower Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This sprawling or climbing annual has round, shield-shaped, slightly waxy leaves on long stalks joined at the centre, and bright orange, yellow or red trumpet-shaped flowers with a long backward spur that holds nectar. Every part has a hot, peppery taste, and the leaves, flowers and green seed pods are all eaten in salads.

Question 2

This water plant of Asia and northern Australia holds its large pink or white bowl-shaped flowers, and its round, shield-like leaves, high above the surface on stiff stalks. The leaves shed water and dirt completely, staying spotless. It is a religious symbol of purity rising from muddy water, and its flat-topped seed head is a florist's favourite.

Question 3

This low, creeping wild plant of damp meadows and lawns has small, glossy, cup-shaped, bright yellow flowers of five overlapping petals, so shiny they look varnished. Children hold one under a friend's chin to see a yellow glow reflected. The whole plant is bitter and poisonous, so grazing animals leave it alone.

Question 4

This vigorous, thorny climbing plant of warm regions drapes walls and fences in sheets of vivid magenta, purple, orange or white. The colour comes not from the flowers, which are tiny, white and tubular, but from three large papery bracts, like coloured tissue paper, wrapped around each cluster of them.

Question 5

This trailing or mounding bedding and hanging-basket plant, from South America, is smothered all summer in soft, funnel-shaped, five-lobed flowers with a wide, flat face, in almost every colour and often striped, veined or edged. The stems and leaves are slightly sticky to the touch, and the flowers droop and close in rain.

Question 6

This airy annual has feathery, thread-like leaves and simple, saucer-shaped flowers with a small yellow centre and eight broad, slightly notched petals in white, pink or crimson, on long slender stems that sway in the wind. It self-seeds readily and flowers on into autumn.

Question 7

This spring bulb bears a smooth, cup-shaped flower of six waxy segments on a single bare stem, in almost every colour and often striped or feathered. Wild forms came from Central Asia and Turkey. In 1630s Holland, bulbs of prized kinds briefly sold for the price of a house before the market collapsed.

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About Identify the Flower

Can you name the flower? Each question shows a photograph of a flower and gives three short, easy sentences about it: what it looks like, where it grows, and how it is used or what it stands for, without ever saying its name. You then pick it from four choices, and the answer tells you more.

The flowers are the ones almost everyone has seen: the garden and florist favourites like the rose, the tulip, the lily, the carnation and the chrysanthemum; the field and lawn flowers such as the poppy, the daisy, the dandelion and the bluebell; and flowers with a strong meaning somewhere in the world, like the lotus, the marigold, the jasmine and the cherry blossom.

Part of the fun is learning to read a flower from a few features. How many petals, and are they separate or joined into a trumpet, a cup or a bell? Is there one flower to a stem or a whole head made of many tiny ones? Does it grow from a bulb, a climbing stem, a shrub or a tree? Is it scented, and does the scent get stronger at night? A handful of clues like these usually narrows it down.

Many of these flowers carry a bigger story. Several are national or royal emblems. One set off what is often called the first stock-market bubble. One covered the battlefields of a world war and is now worn to remember the dead. One is a symbol of purity in three religions, and one, in much of Europe, may only be given at a funeral.

The clues never name the flower or use a word that would give it away at once, so getting the answer means recognising the shape and the description rather than reading a label. Every photograph is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, chosen from public-domain or Creative Commons sources so there is no copyright question, and every fact has been checked. The wording is kept simple, so the quiz plays the same for a keen gardener and for someone who has never grown anything.