Native Wildflowers of the North Dakota Grasslands

Downy Paintbrush (Castilleja sessiliflora)

Readers wishing to view this spring beauty will have to trudge to the tops
of the gravelly prairie hills. This plant inhabits dry grassland sites from
Saskatchewan and Manitoba south to Oklahoma, at elevations up to 7,500 ft.

Downy paintbrush is unusual in that the conspicuous colors are mostly not
due to the flowers, which are small and greenish, but to the bracts below
them. These bracts are creamy-yellow and about one to two inches long; as
many as two dozen occur on a single stem. The six- to twelve-inch stems are
unbranched, but occur in small bunches from divided rootstocks. Leaves are
numerous, narrow, divided, and about as long as the flowers. The whole plant
is grayish-hairy. Fruits are small capsules filled with tiny, reticulated
seeds.

Downy paintbrush is not greatly relished by livestock so it survives under
fairly heavily grazed conditions. However, best stands are found on lightly
grazed hilltops.

This plant belongs to the large family known as the figworts (Scrophulariaceae),
so called because by the old medical "doctrine of signatures," whereby the
appearance of plant parts determined their curative value. The fleshy knobs
on the roots of some figworts were supposed to cure scrophula and remove figwarts.

The generic name was dedicated to the distinguished Spanish botanist Domingo
Castillejo in 1781. The specific name sessiliflora means "stalkless
flowers" in botanical Latin. Downy paintbrush was first described for science
by the German botanist Frederick Pursh in 1814. Pursh was the first to publish
upon plants collected on lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase.