Golden paintbrush (Castilleja levisecta), is thriving this year on the Land Bank’s Cady Mountain Preserve. We counted 57 flowering stems on one particularly impressive plant! A fun fact about this rare beauty: it gets some of its food and water by parasitizing the roots of adjacent plants. One of this vampire’s favorite “host plants” is wooly sunflower (Eriophyllum lanatum).
Although recently removed from the federal Endangered Species list, golden paintbrush still needs a helping hand. The Land Bank continues to expand paintbrush habitat on Cady Mountain and also propagates paintbrush and its plant pals (or victims?) at the Salish Seeds Project.