Plants of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
The 6 plants you can find at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, 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 Colorado blue columbine
Aquilegia coerulea
Colorado's blue-and-white state flower, its long spurs full of nectar that only a hawkmoth's tongue can reach.
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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 Two-needle pinyon
Pinus edulis
A short, gnarled pine of the drier Southwest, growing at Mesa Verde, Black Canyon, and Great Sand Dunes, with nuts a jay plants by forgetting them.
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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.