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Wildflower Hotline: The Wonders of Deer Creek Canyon

Jen Toews
May 26, 2018
3 min read

Wednesday, May 23rd found me hiking at Deer Creek Canyon under a beautiful blue Colorado sky. I had the day off and needed to scout a wildflower hike I would be leading for the Botanic Gardens. (Whether I really needed to scout or whether I wanted a legitimate excuse for a midweek hike when I could be working on any number of other projects is debatable.) The scouting trip reminded me of why I think Deer Creek Canyon is the best place to see wildflowers in the lower foothills near Denver in mid-May to early June. Here, the plains meet the foothills, communities of deciduous trees and shrubs and dense conifer forests come together, and a shady riparian canyon provides a respite from the drier, sunnier habitats on a hot day. There is a remarkably diverse amount of flowering species, which are easily observed from the trail. The peak for this spectacle is late May and early June, when the Canyon flushes many shades of green and the trailsides are covered in a bouquet of colorful wildflowers.

One of the wildflowers I look forward to seeing here every spring is the common Penstemon secundiflorus (sidebells penstemon), with it's secund racemes of lavender flowers. Penstemon can be tough to ID, but this one is easy thanks to the fact that the flowers are not blue and the leaves are glabrous and glaucous, a fancy way of saying the leaves are smooth (hairless) and waxy, which gives them a blue-green color.

I highly recommend wandering through a Gambel oak (Quercus gambelii) grove in the spring (and the fall and winter too, but especially the spring) because the leaves are a young, happy, carefree green.

After the Plymouth Trail wanders under the full sun for awhile, it disappears into the shady canyon for a bit, and the plant life changes dramatically. Here is Rubus deliciosus (delicious raspberry) in a glade; the large, showy white flowers remind me of a familiar scene from my childhood: a flowering Pacific dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) in the shady, western woods.

Some woodsy white flowers. Click on images for IDs.

Gambel Oak and Penstemon virens (Front Range penstemon) growing side by side.

Halfway through the hike a thunderstorm brought rain, causing the temperature to drop and the color of the sky to change to a moody gray. After awhile, it began to pour. I had brought a ziplock baggy for my camera thankfully, but no rain gear for myself.

The spring thunderstorm freshened the plant life up nicely.

Delphinium nuttallianum (Nuttall's larkspur) growing in the understory of a Gambel oak grove

Mertensia lanceolata peaking through Gambel oak leaves -- there is something delightful about this color combination.

Another photo of Penstemon virens, because it is so beautiful.

A striking combination: Lithophragma parviflorum (small-flowered woodland star) and Delphinium nuttallianum. I always enjoy seeing the woodland stars of Deer Creek, because in Colorado, this genus is more commonly found on the Western Slope.

Hydrophyllum fendleri (Fendler's waterleaf) left and Phacelia hastata (scorpion weed) right. Can you tell the two species are closely related by looking at the flower morphology? Both are in the borage family.