Spring Beauty

Claytonia lanceolata

flowering season: March - June

photos: Lookout Mountain Preserve, CO

One of the earliest spring ephemerals, she blooms just a few days after snowmelt. She can bloom in large patches, but is more commonly found in small colonies in sunny spots under stands of ponderosa pine. She is just 2-4 inches tall, her flowers are pale pink with pink stripes, her leaves are slender and pointed, and her blooms only last about two weeks.

After blooming, she dies back to her root (called a corm), a round, edible tuber 1-4 inches long, grazed by deer, elk, sheep, and bear, and foraged by Indigenous peoples. Tasting of mild radishes when raw, and like potatoes when roasted or boiled, her corm kept well as a winter food. Her leaves are also edible and rich in Vitamin A and C, as she belongs to the Montiaceae, or “miner’s lettuce” family.

Another species, Claytonia rosea (Western or Rocky Mountain Spring Beauty) is also found in Colorado. Claytonia virginica is often found and foraged in woodlands of the eastern and midwestern United States, her flowers and leaves prized as sweet salad greens.

Shop prints of Spring Beauty~ 5x7 * 8x10 * poster print

Mountain Ball Cactus

flowering season: April to July

photos: Matthews Winters Park, CO

Bearberry

Kinnikinnick, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi

flowering season: March - June

A low-growing evergreen shrub, she grows into large mats that carpet forest floors. Her leaves are shiny and leathery, her tiny bell-shaped flowers hang in small clusters in spring, and bright red berries form in late summer. The berries are bland when eaten raw, but were cooked with meat and dried into cakes by Indigenous peoples, and can be made into jams and jellies. Young leaves can be made into a tea, a traditional medicine for urinary tract health. Bears in particular utilize this plant - in late fall, they eat the berries and other vegetation to create a blockage in their digestive system for the winter hibernation season. She can also be used to make a yellow dye.

She is often called Kinnikinnick, an Algonquin word for "that which is mixed". Dried Bearberry leaves are often the base ingredient, combined with other herbs (red osier dogwood, arrowroot, sumac, laurel, huckleberry, cherry bark, mullein, and sometimes tobacco) for smoking mixtures. Recipes for mixtures vary, as do the uses, from social, to spiritual, to medicinal. By extension, the name came to be used for many shrubs of which the bark and leaves are used in smoking mixtures, but this plant is Bearberry or Uva Ursi.

Filaree

Storksbill, Pinkets, Erodium cicutarium

flowering season: May to August

photo: South Table Mountain Park, CO

Wax Currant

One-sided Penstemon

Rosy Pussytoes

Pink Pussytoes, Antennaria rosea

flowering season: June- July

Scarlet Beeblossom

Wild Honeysuckle, Scarlet Gaura, Gaura coccinea

flowering season: March - August

Aspen Pea Flower

Sweetpea, Lathyrus laetivirens

flowering season: May through July

photos: South Table Mountain Park, CO

Wild Rose

flowering season: June and July

photos: South Table Mountain Park, CO

Showy Milkweed

Milkweed, Butterflyweed

flowering season: June and July

photos: Golden, CO

Wild Geranium

Sticky Geranium, Geranium viscosissimum

flowering season: May through July

photos: Golden Gate Canyon State Park, CO

Spotted Coralroot Orchid

Corallorhiza maculata

flowering season: May through August

photos: Golden Gate Canyon State Park, CO

Mountain Ninebark

Physocarpus monogynus, this blooming shrub is also named for her bark that peels into long strips along her thin branches

flowering season: May and June

photos: South Table Mountain Park, CO

Pinedrops

Woodland Pinedrops, Pterospora andromedea ❤️ She has no chlorophyll, instead lives in a parasitic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi under conifer trees

flowering season: June to August

photos: Golden Gate Canyon State Park, CO