Rose Verbena
From a distance Rose Verbena can masquerade as a patch of phlox; at knee level, its hairy trailing stems, rooted nodes, and opposite three-part toothed leaves give the glade plant away.
United States: places and wildlife — page 7
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Flowering Dogwood
Dogwood’s famous white “petals” are actually bracts framing a compact bouquet of tiny true flowers.
Shortleaf Pine
Shortleaf pine once shaped vast Ozark landscapes, and restoration is rebuilding the open, fire-influenced woodland beneath its crowns.
Ozark Chinquapin
Once a canopy tree, Ozark chinquapin now often survives as repeated sprouts fighting the introduced chestnut-blight fungus.
Eastern Black Walnut
Black walnut combines valuable dark timber with a green-husked fruit whose hidden shell demands patience from squirrels and people alike.
New England Cottontail
New England’s only native cottontail depends on dense young forest, a habitat that disappears as shrubland matures or is fragmented.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Move from a Gothic Revival landmark into galleries where European masters, American modernism, decorative arts, and contemporary installations repeatedly change scale.
Puritan Tiger Beetle
One of America’s rarest tiger beetles survives along exposed banks of the Connecticut River and Chesapeake Bay—nowhere between them.
Yale University Art Gallery
Ancient sculpture, African art, American painting, modern abstraction, and photography meet inside buildings that make looking itself part of the lesson.
American Shad
This ocean-going herring returns to fresh water each spring, reconnecting the Connecticut River with the Atlantic in one powerful migration.
Yale Center for British Art
Daylight, travertine, concrete, and oak frame British paintings, sculpture, drawings, and rare books in Louis Kahn’s final museum building.
Block Island Meadow Vole
A distinct meadow-vole subspecies lives only on Block Island, where fields, shrub edges, predators, and island history shape its whole range.
Yale Peabody Museum
Fossils, minerals, anthropology, and habitat displays return in a renovated museum where historic specimens meet contemporary research and interpretation.
Mystic Seaport Museum
Historic vessels, shipyard skills, maritime collections, and a recreated seaport village make New England’s relationship with the sea physical and walkable.
Rhode Island Red
Developed around Little Compton, this deep-red dual-purpose chicken became a globally familiar farm breed and Rhode Island’s official state bird.
New Britain Museum of American Art
A focused national collection moves from early portraiture and Hudson River landscapes to illustration, modernism, and contemporary art at a manageable scale.
North Atlantic Right Whale
A broad back, rough head callosities, and V-shaped blow identify one of Earth’s rarest whales when it gathers seasonally off Massachusetts.
Bruce Museum
Minerals, fossils, regional ecology, and changing art exhibitions share a dramatically expanded Greenwich museum beside Bruce Park.
Northern Red-bellied Cooter
Massachusetts protects a far-northern, geographically isolated population of this large basking turtle through one of America’s longest headstart programs.
Atlantic Cod
A chin barbel, pale lateral line, and three dorsal fins identify the cold-water fish that shaped Massachusetts food, trade, and politics.
Connecticut Science Center
Ten floors of interactive exhibits turn forces, health, space, engineering, and the river environment into experiments rather than display cases.
Florence Griswold Museum
A boardinghouse, painted doors, riverside gardens, and galleries preserve the social world that made Old Lyme an American art colony.
Jesup’s Milkvetch
This federally endangered wildflower survives only on a few ice-scoured ledges beside the Connecticut River in Vermont and New Hampshire.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Changing exhibitions and outdoor works make this small Ridgefield museum a place to encounter contemporary art without a permanent-collection safety net.
Morgan Horse
Descending from a single Vermont stallion called Figure, the Morgan became a compact, versatile American breed known for strength and willing movement.
Mattatuck Museum
Regional industry, immigration, community life, and American art share a renovated downtown museum that keeps local history in conversation with wider visual culture.
White Mountain Fritillary
This small orange fritillary exists nowhere outside the Presidential Range alpine zone, where wind, cold, rock, and dwarf plants define survival.
Robbins’ Cinquefoil
Once pushed toward extinction by collecting and trampling, this miniature alpine plant now survives in carefully protected Mount Washington habitat.
Submarine Force Library & Museum
The USS Nautilus and a shore museum explain submarine design, hidden work, navigation, and the people who served beneath the sea.
Connecticut River Museum
Three floors above the Essex waterfront connect Indigenous presence, shipbuilding, trade, wildlife, and changing river conditions to the water outside.
Purple Finch
New Hampshire’s state bird is a stout forest finch whose males look washed in raspberry and whose movements follow shifting seed crops.
Atlantic Puffin
Atlantic puffins returned to historic Maine nesting islands through decades of seabird restoration, social attraction, and careful colony protection.
Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center
Immersive landscapes, archaeology, oral history, objects, and contemporary tribal voices tell a long Pequot story beyond a single colonial conflict.
Katahdin Arctic Butterfly
This cold-adapted butterfly survives on Katahdin’s alpine tableland, isolated from related arctics by forest and thousands of years of climate change.
New England Air Museum
Civil, military, and Connecticut-built aircraft reveal aviation through full machines, restored interiors, engines, and the labor behind flight.
Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry
Changing exhibitions reveal puppets as engineered performers shaped by material, movement, voice, politics, and the hands that animate them.
Furbish’s Lousewort
Rediscovered after decades of presumed extinction, this rare wildflower lives only on naturally eroding banks of the upper Saint John River.
The Mark Twain House & Museum
Guided rooms, decorative surfaces, family stories, and the nearby museum trace the Hartford years when Samuel Clemens produced much of his defining work.
Willow Ptarmigan
Feathered feet, seasonal white plumage, and a taste for willow let this Arctic grouse remain active through Alaska’s long winter.
Alaska Blackfish
This small Arctic fish survives warm, stagnant summer ponds and oxygen-poor winter water by gulping air into a specialized esophagus.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
Stowe’s final Hartford home uses objects, documents, and facilitated discussion to examine writing, abolition, family, race, and the limits of reform.
Glacier Bay Water Shrew
Known from a small part of Southeast Alaska, this rare semi-aquatic shrew swims cold streams on fringed feet and hunts underwater prey.
The Glass House
Philip Johnson’s transparent house is only one structure in a 49-acre composition of architecture, art, paths, views, and deliberate contrasts.
Hill-Stead Museum
Theodate Pope Riddle’s Colonial Revival home preserves paintings, furnishings, archives, gardens, and landscape as an unusually intact personal composition.
Nēnē
Evolved from Canada goose ancestors, nēnē traded strongly webbed feet for better walking across Hawaiian lava and upland grasslands.
ʻIʻiwi
A long curved bill and brilliant scarlet body identify this endemic honeycreeper, now pushed upslope as mosquitoes carry avian malaria.
Weir Farm National Historical Park
Studios, stone walls, orchard, pond, and farm buildings preserve the Connecticut place where J. Alden Weir and later artists worked outdoors and in company.
Gillette Castle State Park
William Gillette’s hand-designed fieldstone home joins carved mechanisms, eccentric rooms, former railway paths, and broad Connecticut River views.