The Northern Gentian came first, sometime in the middle of summer, along Going-to-the-Sun Road, where the soil had yet to dry out in the Rocky Mountain sunshine - Northern Gentian prefers moist soils. I had pulled over to enjoy some roadside wildflower patches that were predominantly Yellow and Small-flowered Penstemon. While walking along the road I noticed a few small lavender-colored flowers. It brief, close-up look-see was all it took to put these little flowers in a family (Gentianaceae). They were clearly gentians.
The generic Gentianella means "little gentian," which it certainly is. The entire plant gets no more than 16 inches tall. The small trumpet-shaped flowers - less than one inch long - have four or five sepals, petal lobes, and stamens. They range in color from nearly white to pale blue to purplish-blue. A feathery fringe lines the inside of the throat of the flower. Scattered here and there, there are not the first thing you notice, but where they grow in large colonies, they are a striking sight.
Flowers in this genus do not have pleats between the petal lobes, which is a field mark of Gentiana genus. Nor do they sport fringe on the margin of the petal lobes as do gentians in the Gentianopsis genus.
A few weeks later, investigating the Highline Trail on Logan Pass in Glacier National Park, my wife and I found patches of what was clearly a gentian, but the flowers hadn't opened yet. When they did finally open, and I discovered them to be Bog Gentian, something I had seen on Mt. Rainier, I was a tad disappointed, but then I saw them in grand patches of deep blue along Highline Trail, the Piegan Pass trail, and the trail to Hidden Lake, and I felt nothing but joy.
Bog Gentian is a big showy specimen of a gentian. Like Northern Gentian, it also prefers moist soils, and is clearly fond of high elevations. Its richly deep-blue trumpet-shaped flowers, which get up to one and a half inches long, are greenish-yellow inside the trumpet, with speckles and stripes. They are the kind of a wildflower that stops you in your tracks, and makes continuing your hike a real chore. And even when you know what you're going to find, they are no less a surprise.
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