Friesner Herbarium staff as well as students from Butler University’s Center for Urban Ecology, are completing an inventory of the flora of Marion County in Indianapolis, Indiana. The project grew out of inventory work done in 16 natural areas, 10 of which are Indianapolis city parks. We created a database of all historical records of plants collected or reported for the county. To this information we added our recent inventories and those of several other researchers. This will allow us to get a historical and contemporary view of the county’s flora. Slightly over 1,000 taxa have been reported for the county. In our surveyed sites, several of which are state-dedicated nature preserves, 80% of species, on average, were native plants.
The photos and information are a compilation of what we have documented on our inventories around Marion County and the Butler University campus, thus may not represent everything that could be growing in Marion County, Indiana.
Friesner Herbarium staff are actively exploring plants that grow wild in the city. Much of this work has been done in conjunction with and/or funded by the City of Indianapolis Land Stewardship Office, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, and Reconnecting to our Waterways (ROW).
Please contact the Herbarium at mmoore@butler.edu if you wish to use a photograph in our Flora collection for a purpose other than educational. We also welcome photo submissions from other photographers.