National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Indian Paintbrush

The Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja linariaefolia Benth.)


Some years ago the school children of Wyoming, feeling that their State ought to have a duly chosen queen of the flowers, undertook to elect one. They chose the dainty and universally admired fringed gentian. But while no flower is more beautiful, many people in Wyoming thought there were others more representative and typical of their State. This feeling culminated in legislative action in 1917, with the result that beautiful Queen Gentian had to abandon her throne to the narrow-leaved Indian paintbrush.

The paintbrush belongs to the figwort family, which includes a great host of beauties. Some of its cousins are the mullens, the toadflaxes, the snap-dragons, the turtle-heads, the beard-tongues, the monkey flowers, the speedwells, the foxgloves, and the eye-brights. Closest of kin are the painted cups, an attractive group of posies.

Most of the Castilleja tribe are inclined to be parasitic in their habits. Instead of sending out rootlets themselves in order to absorb the plant food and moisture that Nature provides, some of them send their roots down into those of other plants and feast all summer long. Like the lily, they toil not, neither do they spin; but if Solomon was ever in all his glory arrayed as they are, that fact was overlooked by the historians of his day.

Wyoming's flower, while not possessed of the deep hue characteristic of the Castilleja tribe—declared by one of our leading botanists to be “the brightest spot of red the wild palette can show”—makes up in delicacy what it lacks in intensity. The blossom is light red, with touches of soft yellow and hints of salmon pink.

No traveler in the Rocky Mountains, the High Sierras, or the sagebrush regions of the Great Basin can forget the paintbrushes. Where they dwell among the blue lupines, the yellow mimulus, and other bright blossoms, they perfect a combination of hues that transforms the veriest riot of color into an orderly aggregation of polychromatic beauty.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 500. (Illustration from page 515.)