This lifeform is found east of the Continental Divide in North America. The white color will help identify this lifeform. This lifeform is found in swamps or very moist ground.

American water plantain is found from New England west to Minnesota and south to Florida and Texas. The petioles are often longer than the leaves. (Alisma plantago-aquatica ssp. subcordatum and Alisma plantago-aquatica var. parviflorum have both become Alisma subcordatum.)

Alisma genus is native to the northern temperate zones and also Australia.  There are nine species in this genus.   These rooting plants can be submerged or terrestrial.  There are four species now living in greater North America.  Because of the similarity of the European A. plantago-aquatica Linnaeus to both A. triviale Pursh and A. subcordatum Raf, it is difficult to determine if the European species is also established in North America.  If it is established,  there would be five species in greater North America.

Water Plantain Family (Alismataceae) is small family with approximately one hundred species. These species are spread across about 11 genera. There are five genera with 37 species growing in greater North America including Greenland, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Order Helobiae is a mixed assemblage of mostly aquatic plant families. Included here are the pondweeds, Sagittaria, eel-grass, and water plantains.

Monocots are a large group of plants usually characterized by having leaves with parallel veins and a seed with a single shell. Most flowers are created with multiples of three. In  the older botany texts, the Monocots were considered more primitive than the Dicots. However, many recent authors have placed the Monocots as an offshoot of the primitive Dicots. Here they are placed before the Dicots.

Seed plants (Phylum Embryophyta) are generally grouped into one large phylum containing three major classes: the Gymnosperms, the Monocots, and the Dicots. (Some scientists separate the Gymnosperms into a separate phylum and refer to the remaining plants as flowering plants or Angiospermae.)

For North American counts of the number of species in each genus and family, the primary reference has been John T. Kartesz, author of A Synonymized Checklist of the Vascular Flora of the United States, Canada, and Greenland (1994). The geographical scope of his lists include, as part of greater North America, Hawaii, Alaska, Greenland, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Kartesz lists 21,757 species of vascular plants comprising the ferns, gymnosperms and flowering plants as being found in greater North America (including Alaska, Hawaii, Greenland, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands).

There are estimates within the scientific world that about half of the listed North American seed plants were originally native with the balance being comprised of Eurasian and tropical plants that have become established.

Plant kingdom contains a large variety of different organisms including mosses, ferns, and seed plants. Most plants manufacture their energy from sunlight and water. Identification of many species is difficult in that most individual plants have characteristics that have variables based on soil moisture, soil chemistry, and sunlight.

Because of the difficulty in learning and identifying different plant groups, specialists have emerged that study only a limited group of plants. These specialists revise the taxonomy and give us detailed descriptions and ranges of the various species.  Their results are published in technical journals and written with highly specialized words that apply to a specific group.

On the other hand, there are the nature publishers. These people and companies undertake the challenging task of trying to provide easy to use pictures and descriptions to identify those species.