Plants of Glacier National Park
The 16 plants you can find at Glacier National Park, like the American pasqueflower — sizes, diets, and whether you should worry.
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Plant American pasqueflower
Pulsatilla patens ssp. multifida
A furry, purple-blue prairie flower that beats the grass out of the ground each spring, blooming before almost anything else is green.
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Plant Beargrass
Xerophyllum tenax
A mountain plant that is not a grass but a lily, sending up a tall creamy plume only every few years, its tough leaves woven into watertight baskets and hats.
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Plant Big sagebrush
Artemisia tridentata
The silver-leaved, sharp-smelling evergreen shrub of the high desert West, and the main food of the greater sage-grouse nearly all year.
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Plant Black huckleberry
Vaccinium membranaceum
The dark purple berry that feeds Glacier's bears and half the pancakes in Montana, growing on open and burned slopes all over the park.
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Plant Douglas-fir
Pseudotsuga menziesii
One of the tallest trees on Earth, not actually a true fir, whose cones carry little three-pointed flaps a Native story calls the tails and legs of hiding mice.
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Plant Engelmann spruce
Picea engelmannii
A high-elevation spruce with scaly bark and sharp, squarish needles, whose Colorado stands have lost more than a million acres to a beetle since 1996.
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Plant Fireweed
Chamerion angustifolium
A tall pink-purple wildflower that is often the first color to return to a burned mountainside.
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Plant Glacier lily
Erythronium grandiflorum
A nodding yellow spring flower whose bulb is such important grizzly bear food that the bear's digging can grow bigger flowers the following year.
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Plant Indian paintbrush
Castilleja miniata
A scarlet mountain wildflower that steals water and food from its neighbors' roots, and whose bright color comes from leaves, not petals.
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Plant Lodgepole pine
Pinus contorta var. latifolia
The thin-barked pine covering 80% of Yellowstone's forest, some of whose cones only open in the heat of a fire.
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Plant Ponderosa pine
Pinus ponderosa
A tall western pine whose sun-warmed bark smells like butterscotch and vanilla, and which drops its low branches so ground fire can pass safely beneath it.
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Plant Quaking aspen
Populus tremuloides
A white-barked mountain tree whose flat-stemmed leaves shiver in the lightest breeze, turning whole hillsides gold each fall.
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Plant Subalpine fir
Abies lasiocarpa
A narrow, spire-shaped high-mountain fir with smooth gray bark and flat, soft needles, moving in wherever fire has stayed away long enough.
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Plant Western red cedar
Thuja plicata
The great rainforest tree of the Northwest Coast, called the tree of life, used by Coast Salish and other nations for canoes, longhouses, and baskets.
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Plant Western wheatgrass
Pascopyrum smithii
A blue-green prairie grass whose underground rhizomes weave a tough sod — the official state grass of North and South Dakota.
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Plant Whitebark pine
Pinus albicaulis
The twisted pine at Glacier's treeline that feeds grizzlies and Clark's nutcrackers, holds the snowpack in place, and is dying faster than it grows.