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Yellow Monkeyflower · Mimulus guttatus


Mimulus guttatus ©Lory Duralia

Description: A long-blooming monkeyflower (spring through fall) with brilliant yellow flowers and rounded, green leaves. Its height is variable (3 to 30") and it will spread outward by rhizomes; it also reseeds. It is native to streams and wet, seepy areas from Alaska to Mexico and east to the Great Plains. Good waterside plant. Part sun/sun, regular water.

Lewis collected a specimen of yellow monkey-flower on July 4, 1806. He and his party of nine men had recently parted ways, temporarily, with Capt. Clark. They were travelling from near present-day Missoula, Montana, to a campsite recorded in the journals as being along "a river they called Cokahlarishkit, or the river of the road to baffaloe."