One recent morning in the mountains near his home in southwest Colorado, Al Schneider was looking for the wildflowers he has admired for decades around this time of year. 

“Some plants were just not there,” he said. Others “were much smaller than normal.” And for others, “it was apparent they would never make it to seed,” Schneider said. “The flowers were just crinkled, dried up.” 

There in the San Juan Mountains and all across Colorado, the historically dry winter and spring are leaving their marks in places where we’ve come to expect multicolored blooms. Expectations are always high for the annual Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, happening July 10-19 in the state’s “wildflower capital.”

“It might be a little more subtle and less showy than some years,” said Ian Billick, Crested Butte’s mayor who has long studied local flora as the outgoing executive director of Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. 

He said many flowers have bloomed early, popping where they might otherwise still be waiting under snow. Maybe rain will prolong other blooms or maybe cherished perennials will fade for an early slumber. 

“They need that water in order to grow, either putting energy into their roots or into the creation of other wildflowers,” Billick said. “They tend to be pretty conservative. It’s kind of like when the economy is down: People keep a little bit more money in the bank, they’re a little less showy. Same with wildflowers.” 

But there’s one odd exception this summer ー one species eye-catching though underappreciated compared with the more vibrant, delicate likes of columbine and lupine.

“It’s actually a pretty amazing year for the green monument plant,” Billick said.

And not just in Crested Butte, where the white flower-packed stalks as tall as people march across valleys close to town. 

There Schneider was in the distant San Juans that day, stopping to catch his breath that was taken away. 

“There was an area maybe 100 feet by 50 feet, and there must’ve been 400 full flowering plants,” he said. “It was just fantastic.” 

Fantastic and unexpected ー that’s the monument plant, also commonly called green gentian and scientifically listed as Frasera speciosa on Schneider’s website cataloging the region’s flora. 

According to the curious profile on swcoloradowildflowers.com, the monument plant was historically thought to be biennial, meaning it grew one season, flowered and spread seeds the next season, then died. 

“But continuous research since 1973 by Dr. David Inouye at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, indicates that Monument Plant produces flowers only once in its lifetime of 20 to 80 years and then dies,” the profile continues. “It is thus called a monocarpic perennial, i.e., one which grows many years, flowers once, then dies.” 

Around Crested Butte, the plant is flowering in numbers Inouye hasn’t seen since 2019. Around the East River Valley he has been counting flowering stalks every year going back to the ’70s, and many years he is counting on two hands. 

“That year, in 2019, there were over 30,000 flowering,” Inouye said. “I haven’t done my count this year, but it’s going to be maybe close to that number.” 

The mass flowering synchronization has baffled other longtime observers, including Jeff Mitton, professor emeritus at University of Colorado Boulder. In 2019, he drew on Inouye’s decades-long research in writing: “The plant’s commitment to flower this summer was made years ago, not during the rainy spring.”

As is the case this summer following the dry spring, Inouye suspects. How? Why? Those are questions he continues to pursue more than 50 years after starting his research.

What the data seem to be telling him: “I think it has to do with how much rain we get during the summer four years ago. That seems to be the trigger. If we get enough rain, it triggers the beginning of the formation of the flowering stalk.”

Jennifer Bousselot has also marveled at the plant and Inouye’s work. She’s an assistant professor of horticulture at Colorado State University. 

While not popularly on the checklist of wildflower watchers, the monument plant “is one of my absolute favorites,” Bousselot said. “The lifecycle just brings you to your knees.”

Inouye has gotten familiar with another monocarpic perennial: Tetraneuris grandiflora, the alpine sunflower known as Old-Man-of-the-Mountain.

“But it has a much shorter period, maybe something like eight to 15 years before it flowers once and then it dies,” Inouye said. 

At lower elevations around Crested Butte, he has tracked monument plants living 30 to 40 years before flowering. At another study site along Cumberland Pass above 12,000 feet, “some of those plants are likely to be 100 years old before they flower and die,” he said. 

There in the high alpine they are not much taller than a foot. Closer to town, Inouye measured one growing past 9 feet.

He has noted stalks averaging about 600 flowers. And before the plants die, he believes they are capable of producing tens of thousands of seeds, which tend to be covered by fallen leaves that decompose and act as a natural fertilizer. 

But the questions remain: What is it that triggers the plants to flower? And why do they do so en masse decades after reaching their monumental heights? 

In a recent article for The Crested Butte News, Inouye wrote: “Given that they only have one opportunity to reproduce, it’s not surprising that the plants put a lot of energy into the effort, making themselves visually conspicuous and highly attractive to pollinators.” 

Pollinators, of course, are essential to the next generation. 

“One advantage is that if you flower when your neighbors do, you can all benefit from the cross-pollination that results as pollinators move pollen from one plant to another,” Inouye went on. He added: “The mass flowering may also help to minimize the loss of flowers and seeds to herbivores” such as nibbling deer. 

But Inouye has wondered, too, about disadvantages. 

Just as he has tracked monument plants for five decades, he has also tracked bumblebees. He has so far tracked them lacking this summer. He thinks a late freeze killed queens wintering underground.

While the plants have emerged in numbers not seen for seven years, “the problem is there’s not very many bumblebees,” Inouye said. “So they are suffering from a lack of pollinators.” 

Which leads him to thinking: “It’s a risky strategy to only flower once in your life if it’s a bad year for pollinators, and then if the next year is a drought year, that’s bad for the seedlings.”

He has tracked mass flowering intervals between two to seven years, depending on past summers of rain, or lack thereof. A changing climate could alter those intervals, he recognized. 

“This year, it’s been seven years since the last good flowering year,” he said. “And as the climate continues to dry, that may mean in the future these flowering events are going to be less common.”

That might be a reminder to enjoy the flowers when they come ー as Schneider and his wife did on their recent hike in the San Juans.

While missing wildflowers they had hoped to see, the monument plants were a pleasant surprise. “That’s where we sat down and had a snack,” Schneider said.