Number Seven: Arrowleaf Balsamroot

Mount Jumbo | Missoula, Montana

Another of this valley’s most famous and beloved denizens, Arrowleaf Balsamroot is pure sunshine, transplanted to the mountainside. If it’s not already evident, yes, Arrowleaf is a member of the sunflower family, which counts more than 2,600 species in its brood. Like its leggy, cultivated relation, Arrowleaf boasts both disk and ray flowers — the rays have the big, showy petals that frame the head where the little disk flowers open at the center like rooms in a honeycomb.

In addition to painting the hillsides and stopping foot traffic with its fine faces, Arrowleaf Balsamroot is a staple food source for both human and non-human neighbors. Deer and elk will often nibble down the leaves and shoots once the blooming is done. In this particular place, Salish and Qlispe harvest shoots to be eaten raw and seeds for roasting and grinding into flour. Humans also eat Arrowleaf’s robust taproot, which is packed with nutrients and is often resilient enough to survive a wildfire and bloom another season.

Squirrels and birds prize Arrowleaf’s nutritious seeds as much as humans do.

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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.

My devotion to the practice has waned, due in part to how much Instagram has become enshittified. I’m done creating AI fodder for Zuck’s techbro garbagebaby, so I thought I’d try out the series here, just to see how it goes. To offer the blooming beings who inhabit this corner of Montana as a little touchstone of quiet creativity. To stand as counterpoint to the chaos and gleeful destruction that’s become quotidian. To be an argument against the mind-dessicating force that is artificial intelligence. And to be 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 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.

It’ll still be a few more weeks before the blooming and the posts become regular, but I’ll keep the documentation happening as wildflowers emerge.

Thanks for reading. Hope you like it.