Wildflower

The large-flowered collomia grows from a single branching stem up to three feet tall with narrow leaves one to three inches long. The unusual peach- or salmon-colored blossoms with blue stamens at the center are arranged in many-flowered heads.

Dusty maidens have a highly branched stem up to two feet tall with a compact cluster of one to five inch long leaves at the base. The branches are tipped with white or tan flowers that look like pompoms. These flower heads are made up of tubular white flowers in a dense round cluster.

Diffuse knapweed grows from long taproots into a bush up to two feet tall with a single upright stem sprouting many branches. The stems have fine, short hairs, giving the plant a gray appearance. The leaves are small, alternately arranged, and finely divided.

Thompson’s paintbrush is not a colorful plant, unlike other paintbrushes. The yellow to green “flowers” are actually modified leaves hiding the inconspicuous tubular flowers. The petals fuse into a narrow, elongate tube. The stems are in clusters and usually grow four to sixteen inches tall. Short white hairs cover the stems and leaves.

In the Sage Hills, whitetop often forms a sea of sweet-smelling white flowers. Whitetop grows upright from a single stem eight to twenty inches tall. The flower head is typically flat-topped and dense with white flowers. Flowers have four widely-spaced petals.

Sagebrush mariposa lily is showy and grows up to two feet tall, with a beautiful tulip-like flower that displays petals, sepals and stamens in multiples of three. Each plant has one to three flowers, and the lavender petals are pointed at the tip, with a darker violet band at the base.

This small lily grows from a bulb and has one to several white flowers with petals, sepals and stamens in multiples of three. The hairy-edged petals look like a cat’s ear with a purple “eyebrow” at its base.

This low-growing, cushion-like plant has white, pink, or purple flowers that mature and produce distinctive white woolly seed pods. The stems are only two to four inches long. The leaves are the gray-green color of sagebrush. Like all legumes, locoweed helps to fix nitrogen in the soil.

Bugloss fiddleneck is a weedy plant that thrives on disturbed soil. The small yellow tubular-shaped flowers occur along multiple stems up to two feet tall that coil distinctively like the neck of a fiddle. The plant is very hairy and looks like it is covered in fat green hairy caterpillars.

Russian knapweed grows up to three feet tall with considerably branched stems. Leaves up to six inches long and one and a half inches wide grow near the base of the plant and become smaller toward the top. The small half-inch flower heads on the branch tips may be white, pink, or lavender-blue.