STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
The plant has always seemed one of the most magnificent—and mysterious—in the Sun Valley area.
For years I’ve wandered by the clump of leaves, wondering what kind of plant it could possibly be.
Its lance-like leaves resembled the ears of a deer whorled around the main stem of the plant. They were soft and rather rubbery-like to touch. And the bottom of the leaves were tinged with a beautiful pinkish red color—almost as if it were a Christmas plant.
But no one could tell me what it was. And it never seemed to sport flowers.
That changed in late June during a hike along the North Fork of Deer Creek.
There, coming out of those leaves was a tall elongated cone-shaped plant with dozens of greenish-white star-like flowers with four petals. The flowers contained splotches of purple.
Problem was, I couldn’t be sure. While the leaves were shaped right, they bore no trace of the pinkish red. And they didn’t feel soft and rubbery as my mystery plant had.
But I kept it in mind. And then, on a hike up to Pioneer Cabin near Sun Valley I got my answer.
There in the sunny, open grassy hillside in front of the 1937 skier’s hostel were dozens of these plants reaching toward the sky. What’s more, there were enough of the leaves around without flowers that it seemed very likely they were related.
Then I spotted it—a flower with a tidbit of pink still on its leaves below.
With a little help from my friend Susan Giannettino, I determined that these were green gentians, also known as the monument plant, as deer’s ears, or deer’s tongue.
The scientific name is frasera speciosa.
And there’s a reason I could never seem to catch them with flower.
They don’t flower every year.
Instead, they may live for several years without blooming, storing energy in their taproot. Flowering is unpredictable; some years no flowering plants are seen. Then in years like this year they seem to be everywhere.
For years they have been considered a biennial plant. That is, its leaves grow the first season and its flowers grow the second season. Then, death.
That would make it a monocarpic plant, similar to the Century Plant or Agave of the Southwestern United States, points out Deb Babcock, a master gardener from Steamboat Springs.
But Dr. David Inouye at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colo., aka the wildflower capital of Colorado, determined that it can live between 20 and 80 years before producing flowers and dying.
He theorizes that that periodically large numbers of these plants flower in unison. Spectacular blooms have taken place in 2003, 2005, 2010 and, most recently, around 2015.
Inouye believes that environmental factors trigger the flowering. The 2010 bloom, he said, followed a wet July and August four years before.
A side note: Inouye says the number of leaves roughly corresponds to the age of the plant.
The flowers, which can grow seven feet tall, produce 600 flowers per plant, each with 60 seeds.
It’s tempting to confuse them with the mullein with its fuzzy leaves and yellow corn stalk-like flowers. Or, the false hellebore, also known as the corn lily.
But the mullein’s flowers look nothing like the gentian. The hellebore, which lives in moist areas, features six-petal white flowers with green centers on a stalk and leaves that resemble ribbed corn husks.
Unlike the gentian most grazing animals will avoid the hellebore, says Doreen Dorward, who wrote the flower guide “Along Mountain Trails.” It can be fatal when the shoots are eaten young because of high alkaloid content. Not only are the flowers fatal to insects but they can be downright devastating to honey bees.
In contrast, deer, elk and even cattle love gentian leaves.
The late Dr. Scott Earle of Sun Valley, who wrote the book “Idaho Mountain Wildflowers,” called the gentian family the “aristocrats of alpine flowers.”He was speaking primarily of the blue trumpet-shaped gentians, which grow in wet mountain meadows.
Rare and beautiful, it features a deep blue, bell-shaped flower that typically blooms in mid-summer into September.
It’s difficult to figure out how it could be in the same family as the green gentian. But both are definite rewards at the end of climbs to high-elevation slopes like those around Pioneer Cabin or Big Basin.