Participant Info

Species

Mertensia lanceolata [Mertensia oblongifolia] [Mertensia fusiformis] [Mertensia viridis]

Family

Boraginaceae

CommonName

lanceleaf bluebells

Presence

YES

Status

native

EarliestDate

1911

LatestDate

2016

Ecosystem

foothill, montane, subalpine, tundra

Geobotanical

SSawatch, Garitas, SSanjuans, Culebras, NCristos

Counties

Alamosa, Conejos, Costilla, Hinsdale, Mineral, Rio Grande, Saguache, Archuleta, San Juan

Passes

Cumbres, Music, Stony, Wolf Creek, Slumgullion

WildlifePreserves

Other Localities

PhotoRecords

YES Rich Haswell: Rio Grande Co, road to Middle San Francisco Creek trailhead, north of Del Norte, 6 June 2014; Rock Creek cpgd, 4 July 2016

Comments

Mertensia lanceolata, so named, is the most commonly collected bluebells in the Watershed, preferring open woods and dry ground (including scree slopes), ranging from upper foothill to upper montane. Note that this treatment of Mertensia lanceolata includes var. lanceolata, but not var. viridis or var. nivalis (see Nazaire and Hufford, 2014). In a somewhat larger sense of Mertensia lanceolata (including M. ovata), BONAP shows that the center of its USA distribution is the Central and Front Range Rockies from northern New Mexico to the Canadian border, occasionally (true to its common name) extending into the western Great Plains. Note that the presence of Watershed M. lanceolata in herbaria may be larger or smaller than currently catalogued because most specimens were determined before Nazaire and Hufford's 2014 revision of Mertensia.

Annotation