The green gentian is blooming all over Colorado in the montane zones between 8,000 feet and 12,500 feet in elevation.

This event has a special name – a mast bloom – which is a term for when a large number of plants or trees bloom and produce seed at the same time.

However, the green gentian, Frasera speciosa, is unique. These plants can live for 80 to 100 years as a large clump of lovely green basal leaves, until they receive a signal that they should bloom. After the plant sends up a stalk of gorgeous white flowers with artfully arranged green and purple stripes and spots, it dies. But its seeds fall to the ground and produce plants for the future.

According to biologist David Inouye, a principal investigator at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in the historic mining town of Gothic in Gunnison County, some of the variation in flowering abundance is a consequence of events the last few years.

“For example, many of the perennial wildflowers we study preform leaves and flower buds a year or more before they appear above ground,” he wrote in the lab’s online Field Notes this month.. “The monument plant … starts preforming its flower stalk underground four years before it bolts above ground. We can already see a lot of bolting plants around Gothic, and my guess is that we’ll see a few thousand plants flowering in the valley, somewhere between what we saw in 2019 (31,177) and 2021 (1,693), the last two big flowering years.”

This photo of Ridgway resident Adam Johnson shows how tall the flower spikes of the green gentian can grow. This photo was taken on July 11 on Lizard Head Pass, just above Trout Lake.
Photo by Neal Mathews | Special to the Plaindealer

A mast bloom is nearly over now in the high country. A single plant can produce up to 36,000 seeds. This dramatic display relies on the precipitation of previous years, presumably like that of 2022, and appears not to be affected by this year’s record-low winter precipitation. You can still see the end of the show and check out the stunning number of plants along Crystal Reservoir and the trails of Camp Bird Road, among other locations county-wide.

Green gentian is also called monument plant or elkweed. It can grow to nine feet, but many observed this year are much shorter. It’s especially fun to find one early in the morning when you can find bees cradled in the flowers, gently waking up after falling asleep the previous day after gorging on nectar.

This is the first in a series of columns about Ouray County wildflowers. Mary Menz is a Colorado Native Plant Master. Her books “Wildflowers of Colorado’s Western Slope” and “Common Wildflowers of the San Juan Mountains” can be found at area bookstores.