Number 21: Alpine Forget-Me-Not

Beartooth Highway, Montana

It’s a familiar face, on a body adapted to survive alpine elements. With woolly leaves and a diminutive profile, Alpine Forget-Me-Not adopts the gear and stance that make it possible to survive high altitudes and unrelenting winds. What remains the same is an endearing face, with little white eyes and petals of the same color as the sky that seems to sit closer under this thin air.

Alpine Forget-Me-Not’s scientific name, Eritrichium nanum, is endearingly literal: wooly dwarf.

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In 2015, I started posting daily(ish) photos of Montana wildflowers on Instagram during the blooming season. The series began at a time when my kids were very young and my world’s perimeter had shrunk to match their size. Over the years, it became ballast, my writing practice during difficult days, and a means of more deeply relating with this place where I was born and raised.

This spring, I moved the series from Instagram to Substack, just to see how it goes. I offer it as a tribute to the blooming beings who inhabit this corner of Montana, in all their quiet creativity. I offer it as counterpoint to the chaos and gleeful destruction that’s become quotidian and an argument against the mind-dessicating force that is artificial intelligence. And I offer it as a small practice in citizen science — recording what blooms where and when, documenting variation and norms.

I am not Salish or Kootenai or Nimiipu or Blackfeet, not Indigenous to this land, so I’m offering what I know from my own experience, from my favorite field guides, and from resources I’ve stumbled across in my curiosity. I highly encourage watching Rose Bear Don’t Walk’s presentation on Salish ethnobotany and following the Salish Native Plant Society. Over the years, I’ve picked up a few plant names in Salish and I offer them when I can as a reminder that native plants are integral to the place and the Indigenous people who live here and have always been here. The Montana Native Plant Society and the Montana Natural History Center are also great resources, though they are not Native-led organizations. LANDBACK.

Thanks for reading. Hope you like it.