Montana Field Guide

Plants with a branched caudex. Stems ascending, simple, 5–40 cm. Herbage sparsely villous to glabrous. Leaves basal and cauline; basal blades oblong to oblanceolate, mostly serrate, 1–7 cm long, with 1 prominent vein; basal leaf petioles broad, ciliate; cauline becoming sessile upward. Inflorescence hemispheric- to oblong-paniculate with few heads. Involucres campanulate, 5–7 mm high; phyllaries lanceolate to oblanceolate, ciliate. Rays 12 to 18; ligules 3–5 mm long. Disk flowers 10 to 35; corollas 4–6 mm long. Achenes 1–3 mm long, strigose (Lesica et al. 2012. Manual of Montana Vascular Plants. BRIT Press. Fort Worth, TX).

Our plants are variety scopulorum A.Gray

Often stony soil of grasslands, turf, meadows, dry open forest, talus, fellfields; subalpine, alpine, lower along rivers (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 bifarius, Bombus borealis, Bombus fervidus, Bombus flavifrons, Bombus huntii, Bombus melanopygus, Bombus mixtus, Bombus nevadensis, Bombus rufocinctus, Bombus ternarius, Bombus terricola, Bombus sitkensis, Bombus occidentalis, Bombus pensylvanicus, Bombus bimaculatus, Bombus griseocollis, Bombus impatiens, Bombus insularis, Bombus suckleyi, Bombus bohemicus, Bombus flavidus, and Bombus kirbiellus (Plath 1934, Heinrich 1976, Thorp et al. 1983, Johnson 1986, Shaw and Taylor 1986, Mayer et al. 2000, Colla and Dumesh 2010, Colla et al. 2011, Koch et al. 2012, Williams et al. 2014, Tripoldi and Szalanski 2015).