Fireweed
A tall pink-purple wildflower that is often the first color to return to a burned mountainside.
Fireweed at a glance
Chamerion angustifolium shuh-MEER-ee-on an-gus-tih-FOH-lee-um
- Type
- Plant · wildflowers
- Diet
- Producer
- Size
- Usually 2 to 4 feet tall, about waist to shoulder height on a kid, though it can reach up to 9 feet in good soil.
- Lifespan
- A perennial that regrows from the same rhizomes for many years.
- Conservation
- Not formally assessed by IUCN; common and widespread across the northern United States, Canada, and Eurasia
A green plant that makes its own food from sunlight. Its underground rhizomes usually survive a fire even when everything above ground burns, so it can regrow the very next summer.
Is it safe to touch?
Harmless. Some people eat the young shoots or make tea from the leaves, though there's no need to pick it in a park. Just watch where the color shows up first after a burn.
A year after the 2017 Sprague Fire burned across Mount Brown, the first color to come back to the blackened slope was pink. Whole hillsides of standing dead trees, and running up through the ash between them, spikes of fireweed already tall enough to flower. NPS photos from Glacier call it out by name: one of the first spots of color to return.
The plant is built for exactly that moment. Its rhizomes, tough underground stems, usually ride out a fire even when every stalk above ground burns to nothing, and they send up new shoots as soon as the ground cools. Whatever escapes underground gets help from above: a single fireweed stalk can produce roughly 80,000 seeds, each one lofted on a silky tuft that catches the wind and can carry it a long way onto open, disturbed ground. Between the rhizomes and the seeds, a burned slope rarely stays bare for long.
Come back to a Glacier burn scar the summer after the fire and you can watch this happen instead of reading about it: pink-purple spikes standing up out of black ground, one stalk at a time answering the question of what happens next.
Did you know?
- Fireweed was one of the first plants to add color back to Glacier's Mount Brown a year after the 2017 Sprague Fire.
- A single fireweed stalk can make about 80,000 seeds, each one carried on a tiny silky tuft, which is part of how it colonizes burned or disturbed ground so fast.
- Fireweed picked up the English nickname bombweed because it sprang up so fast on bombed-out lots in London after World War II.
Common questions
Why is it called fireweed?
Because it is often the first flower to bloom in a place that just burned. Its underground rhizomes usually survive the fire and send up new growth the next summer.
Where does fireweed grow?
Across cool northern parts of the United States, Canada, and Eurasia, in meadows, roadsides, and especially on ground that has recently burned or been disturbed.
How does fireweed spread so fast after a fire?
Its rhizomes underground usually survive the burn and resprout, and each stalk also makes about 80,000 seeds that ride the wind on silky parachutes.
Can you eat fireweed?
People do eat young fireweed shoots and make tea and jelly from the plant, but inside a national park it's best left growing so everyone gets to see it.