In the Blue Mist

A run of wet weather the first week of May delivered two inches of precipitation on our place. This quantity might be shrug-worthy in some parts of the world, but in this semi-arid region, two inches can be a notable accumulation for an entire month. To receive that much moisture in seven days felt almost miraculous.

Almost.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I wasn’t then and I’m not now. But virtually all of this precipitation fell as snow, and it had been a very long winter, in more ways than one. Even though most of it melted as it landed, it was still snow. Maybe it was the sheer visibility of it, the individual flakes traceable as they drifted down from the gray skies, that pushed me to the edge. I knew the white would (eventually) yield, but I felt desperate for a sign of something, anything, more spring-like. At one point, I stomped out onto the deck outside the kitchen and yelled: “There’s such a thing as RAIN, y’know!!”

The snow did stop eventually. Clouds yielded to clear skies, unleashing the age-old botanical response. The grasses greened and the wildflowers set about making blooms out of water and sun.

I’m fond of saying that plants in this part of the world like their space. Grasses, shrubs, wildflowers: they all claim their patch of ground, and the light and water that comes with it. The dry environment is not conducive to mass displays of fecundity. Meadows and evergreen woods achieve coverage of bare earth, but layering is pretty minimal, unless you count lichen as understory. Wildflowers, in particular, are spaced out, each plant putting itself on display in a frame of grasses, more a confetti scattering than mass assembly. With one exception.

Blue Mist Penstemon (Penstemon virens) doesn’t mind the company of its kin—if fact it prefers it (one source I looked at recently asserts that plants are rarely found singly). The species likes open sites with an unobstructed south-facing view. When conditions are right, as they were this year, their congregations do indeed create the effect of a pale smoky-blue mist on the rocky slopes they prefer.

Although the display is notable—the only landscape-scale equivalent is fall color—it is more ethereal than teeming. On first glance and from a distance, a patch of flowers might be mistaken for an area of frost, dew, or the shadow of a cloud. Unlike a shadow, however, the haze emanates color instead of dampening it. As you get closer, the violet-blue gauze becomes more intense, and since the plants tend to grow on exposed hillsides here, an aficionado can play with the color saturation, chromatically shifting the pastel wash into concentrated strokes of intense sky blue by lining up an eye-level perspective.

I picked up this trick during a couple of morning drives to fields of the flowers along the county road in June. I wandered around, taking pictures and playing with light and shadow, slope and distance. Although the stands were thick by the standards of this ecoregion, meandering into their array tempered my impression of density: it wasn’t hard to walk through the “mist” without stepping on a flowering stem. In the flowers’ midst, I caught a delicate scent, sufficiently subtle and fleeting to defy description other than “faint whiff of floral,” suggesting that they deploy other attractants to seduce their pollinators. Another nuance I would not have noticed without getting out and into an expanse of the blooms was the variability in flower color.

Penstemons are native to North America, where their tolerance of dry conditions skews their populations westward. Botanists have documented upwards of 270 species in the genus, flowering in a range of colors from white, pink, and lilac to cobalt blue, royal purple, and deep red. The group shares some broad characteristics, notably erect stems bearing tubular flowers. Many species offer their blooms arranged along one side of the flower spike, like pennants unfurled in the wind.

Their common name, beardtongues, is attributed to the hairiness of a sterile fifth stamen, often nestled like a tongue at the bottom of the flower opening. Viewed from the front, a single bloom of P. virens does resemble a caricaturist’s rendering of a goofy mouth, complete with the narrow tongue, and, in some cases, crooked white teeth formed by the pollen-bearing anthers on the upper stamens. The voluptuous lips are purple rather than red, a fashion statement designed to appeal to insect pollinators rather than hummingbirds.

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My diligence at botanizing ebbs and flows. I’m consistent in my admiration of our local flora, but I don’t always pursue identification in the field guides I’ve accumulated over the years. Even when I do look a plant up, descriptions and photos often don’t quite match the individual in front of me. In this case, however, my confidence in the identification is high. In fact, given that penstemons don’t tend to congregate, the appearance of this variety in such large swatches affirms that I’m looking at P. virens even from a hundred and fifty yards away.

Other validating clues lie in the plants’ height; by penstemon standards, the flower spikes are stubby. I live within the limited range of the species, too, which is confined to the foothills of Colorado and Wyoming (one of the other common names for the plant is Front Range Beardtongue). And, to give credit where credit is due, I didn’t make the initial identification myself. When I confessed my ignorance in a post dated July 1, 2019, friend and botanist Susan J. Tweit commented that my “little purple penstemon that blooms earlier than most of the penstemons” was P. virens.

That early bloom time is one point of gratitude among many, a reward enjoyed after the long winter has definitively ended. The wash of color isn’t reliable—some years the mist is more of a faint sprinkle that’s impossible to see without frank attention—and it comes too late to be a harbinger of spring. More than seasonality, then, or the regular cycles of phenology, virens speaks of opportunity: when conditions are right, erupt, unfurl, and smile into the sun.