Plants of the National Parks
Meet the 36 plants we've written up, like the American pasqueflower, and the national parks where you'll find them.
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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 Avalanche lily
Erythronium montanum
A white mountain lily that blooms at the very edge of the melting snow, chasing the snowline uphill all summer as the drifts pull back.
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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 Bigleaf maple
Acer macrophyllum
A Pacific Northwest maple with the largest leaves of any maple, often draped in moss and ferns in the rainforests of Olympic and North Cascades.
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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 Claret cup cactus
Echinocereus triglochidiatus
A low, mounding desert cactus that bursts into bright red, cup-shaped flowers each spring at Arches, Canyonlands, and Big Bend.
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Plant Coast redwood
Sequoia sempervirens
The tallest tree on Earth, a fog-loving evergreen of the northern California coast where trails at Redwood run beneath 300-foot trunks.
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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 Creosote bush
Larrea tridentata
The scraggly desert shrub whose leaves make the smell of desert rain, and whose slow-spreading clone rings are among the oldest living things on Earth.
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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 prickly pear
Opuntia engelmannii
A wide, flat-padded cactus of the southwestern deserts, spreading in low clumps with yellow flowers and purple fruit at Big Bend, Saguaro, and Arches.
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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 Gambel oak
Quercus gambelii
The shrub oak that forms thickets across Black Canyon's rim, with underground buds that resprout after fire.
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Plant Giant sequoia
Sequoiadendron giganteum
The largest tree on Earth by wood volume, growing only in scattered groves on the west slope of California's Sierra Nevada.
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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 Great Basin bristlecone pine
Pinus longaeva
The oldest known single living tree on Earth, a twisted, high-mountain pine that grows in the thin, cold air of Great Basin National Park.
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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 Joshua tree
Yucca brevifolia
A spiky, branching yucca of the Mojave Desert, the plant that gives Joshua Tree National Park its name and its strange, arm-waving skyline.
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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 Saguaro
Carnegiea gigantea
The tall, arm-raising cactus of the Sonoran Desert, found in the United States mainly around Tucson at Saguaro National Park.
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Plant Sitka spruce
Picea sitchensis
The giant of the coastal fog belt, whose light, strong wood built early airplanes, with needles sharp enough to prick your finger.
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Plant Snow plant
Sarcodes sanguinea
A bright red, leafless stalk that pushes up through melting spring snow in the conifer forests of Lassen Volcanic, and makes no food of its own.
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Plant Spanish moss
Tillandsia usneoides
Not a moss at all but a flowering air plant that drapes in gray strands from the branches of trees at Congaree and the Everglades.
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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 Subalpine lupine
Lupinus latifolius
The blue lupine that fills Mount Rainier's Paradise meadows in summer and quietly rebuilds raw volcanic soil by pulling nitrogen from the air.
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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 Utah juniper
Juniperus osteosperma
A short, twisted evergreen of dry canyon country, rooting in cracked rock at Mesa Verde, Black Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, and Craters of the Moon lava fields.
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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 sword fern
Polystichum munitum
The knee-high fern that carpets the Northwest rainforest floor in deep green all year, each leaflet marked with a little hilt like a tiny sword.
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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.
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Plant Yellowstone sand verbena
Abronia ammophila
A white-flowered relative of desert sand verbenas found nowhere on Earth except a few beaches on Yellowstone Lake.