Put names on the faces of the state's flowers

To know the name of a plant, a bird, even a person, is to give it added value. 

You'll appreciate Montana flowers more if you know their names, from the dainty flax along River's Edge Trail to the elusive fairy slippers of the forest to the dramatic bear grass of alpine meadows.

A new guide can help you on your way to becoming a wildflower expert, or at least satisfy your curiosity about the fetching flowers you encounter. 

"Wondering about Wildflowers," a new book by Sharon Huff, Stephen Love and Sharron Akers features over 490 different plants and over 1,400 color photographs from the Northern Rocky Mountains. 

The flowers are sorted by color, with pages trimmed in the blossom color.

The guide has at least one photo but often several photos of a given flower, with a description, common and scientific name, a timeline on when it blooms and what kind of landscape one would find the flower.

Take prairie smoke, or old man's whiskers, or geum triflorum. A member of the rose family, it has hairy, feathery leaves, nodding bell-shaped pink to rose-maroon flowers with five petals on long stalks. It's found in meadows, in forests and on sagebrush plains. 

The photos in the guide were taken along the Lolo Trail on the Montana-Idaho border, in the Stanley and Copper basins of Idaho, at Craters of the Moon National, also in Idaho, in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and in Yellowstone National Parks.

The book is something of a retirement project for Huff and Akers, who both have a lifelong passion of wildflowers and wildflower photography. Love is an Extension agent at the University of Idaho and has collected more than 1,200 species of intermountain native wildflowers and shrubs. 

Book: "Wondering about Wildflowers? A Wildflower Guide for the Northern Rocky Mountains"

Authors: Sharon Huff, Stephen Love, Sharron Akers

Publisher: Sweetgrass Books

Pages: 302

Price: $29.95