Montana Field Guide

Taprooted biennial. Stems erect, mostly unbranched, 15–80 cm. Herbage sparsely arachnoid-villous to arachnoid-tomentose, often purplish. Leaves petiolate below; blades linear to linear-oblanceolate, 10–40 cm long, shallowly to deeply pinnately lobed. Inflorescence capitate with ca. 5 to 20 subsessile heads subtended by leaf-like bracts mostly longer than the flowers; peduncles 0–1 cm long. Involucres ovoid to hemispheric, 15–30 mm high; phyllaries imbricate in 5 to 10 series, green, not keeled; outer lanceolate, glabrate or arachnoid on the margins with a spine 1–8 mm long; inner linear-lanceolate with a hispid-ciliate to scarious-erose tip. Disk corollas white to purple, 20–26 mm long. Achenes 4–7 mm long (Lesica et al. 2012. Manual of Montana Vascular Plants. BRIT Press. Fort Worth, TX).

Moist to wet, sometimes calcareous meadows, grasslands; valleys to subalpine (Lesica et al. 2012. Manual of Montana Vascular Plants. BRIT Press. Fort Worth, TX).

POLLINATORS
The following animal species have been reported as pollinators of this plant species or its genus where their geographic ranges overlap: Bombus vagans, Bombus appositus, Bombus auricomus, Bombus bifarius, Bombus borealis, Bombus centralis, Bombus fervidus, Bombus flavifrons, Bombus frigidus, Bombus huntii, Bombus mixtus, Bombus nevadensis, Bombus rufocinctus, Bombus sylvicola, Bombus ternarius, Bombus terricola, Bombus sitkensis, Bombus occidentalis, Bombus pensylvanicus, Bombus bimaculatus, Bombus griseocollis, Bombus impatiens, Bombus insularis, Bombus suckleyi, Bombus bohemicus, and Bombus flavidus (Thorp et al. 1983, Mayer et al. 2000, Wilson et al. 2010, Colla and Dumesh 2010, Colla et al. 2011, Koch et al. 2012, Williams et al. 2014, Tripoldi and Szalanski 2015).