Ongoing maintenance of the plant’s prairie and grasslands habitats helped support the paintbrush’s return to its native range in Oregon. It’s a good day for the paintbrush, but more needs to be done to save Puget and Willamette prairies and the many endangered species that depend on them.”īy the late 1990s the paintbrush had been eliminated from the Willamette Valley due to habitat loss caused by fire suppression, invasive species, development and recreational picking. “But without the Endangered Species Act, this fragile flower would have been pushed into extinction years ago by unchecked agricultural and residential development. The leaves are narrower than the ‘flower’ bracts. Desert paintbrush plants are hairy and can look slightly grey/brown in color. The bracts of desert paintbrush can range from red, through orange to yellow. The showy ‘flower petals’ are actually 3 to 5 lobed bracts, the yellow green flower is tucked between the bracts. “The upland prairies and grasslands of the Pacific Northwest support many species that, like the golden paintbrush, are uniquely beautiful,” said Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Desert paintbrush brightens up the sagebrush from April to June. And in British Columbia, there are three known sites, each located on a separate island. In Oregon the paintbrush has returned to 26 sites within the Willamette Valley. Bright, blunt spikes of yellow, orange or red bracts signal the flower stalk of Indian paintbrush (Castilleja spp.), a perennial plant native mostly to the. In Washington it lives at 19 sites: five in the South Puget Sound prairie landscape six in the San Juan Islands seven on Whidbey Island, and one near Dungeness Bay in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Now, thanks in part to replanting efforts, at least 48 sites of golden paintbrush have been documented - more than 560,000 plants. The plant, which can grow up to a foot high, was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1997, with only 10 known populations in Washington and British Columbia. Historically found from southwestern British Columbia to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, the golden paintbrush is a short-lived perennial herb with bright yellow flowers and covered in soft, sticky hairs.

Fish and Wildlife Service proposed today to remove a flowering plant called the golden paintbrush, in the Pacific Northwest, from the endangered species list due to its recovery.

Yellow paintbrush flower