White forget-me not

Eastern Washington

White forget-me-not is an Eastern Washington native plant having multiple, somewhat bristly stems densely covered by delicate white flowers with yellow eyes, and hairy gray-green foliage. This perennial wildflower, also called cryptantha, is nicely adapted hot, dry conditions, favors sandy places in the shrub-steppe and pine woods, and blooms in mid-spring.

White forget-me-not flowers have deep nectaries that sustain an assortment spring-foraging bees, beneficial wasps including beetle-eating scoliid wasps, and spring-flying butterflies including Becker's white, Boisduval's blue, silvery blue, acmon/lupine blue, arrowhead blue, green hairstreaks and gray hairstreak butterflies. Cryptanthas can be found in the Columbia Basin and across the arid Great Basin from British Columbia to California and east to Texas and Montana.

White forget-me-not blooms just a little before and with silverleaf phacelia and alonside with flowering mustards that like sandy, eroding hillsides. It also grows where late-spring blooming Douglas' dustymaiden and silky lupine grow, and with gray-green, late-summer blooming snow buckwheat.

According to Young and Young's Collecting, Processing and Germinating Seeds of Wildland Plants, nutlets of the related large-flower cat's-eye or Cryptantha intermedia need no special treatment to germinate. Above-ground, these plants dry completely in the heat of summer and their nutlets fall to the hot sand, suspended in air on spiny calyx hairs. Seeds apparently fall out with the rains of autumn and get covered with damp sand to germinate later. These cryptanthas seem more common on east- and west-facing hillsides, microclimates that are exposed to the hot sun in spring but remain in shadow on sunny, frozen winter days.

White forget-me-not or cryptantha wildflowers - May

Cryptantha swarmed by spring white
and Becker's white butterflies

White forget-me not
providing nectar for silvery blue butterfly

White forget-me not providing nectar
for a red nomad bee

Cryptantha with a cuckoo bee

White forget-me not providing nectar
for the beneficial scarab hunter wasp

White forget-me not

White forget-me not, cat's eye or Snake River cryptantha

Cryptantha rosette in October

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