Montana Field Guide

This excerpt is adapted from the Flora of North America (Vander Kloet in FNA 2009).

PLANTS: Stems clumped, suckering when disturbed, up to 4 m tall; twigs yellow-green or golden brown, glaucous, usually terete, sometimes somewhat angled, glabrous, sometimes hairy in lines.

LEAVES:Leaf blades 25-39 mm long, ovate to elliptic (rarely obovate), pale green or glaucous below, slightly darker pale green above, margins entire to obscurely serrate.

INFLORESCENCE: Calyx lobes vestigial or absent, thin, glaucous and glabrous; corolla 5-7 mm long, globose, sometimes urceolate, and pink, bronze-pink, or greenish white; filaments pilose basally to glabrous. Berries 8-10 mm diameter, blue, dull purplish black, or black, sometimes glaucous.

Oval-leaf Huckleberry - Vaccinium ovalifolium, Not Documented in Montana
Identified by a combination of these characters:
*Habit: Tall shrub that grows in clumps (rarely colonies; suckering when disturbed);
*Twigs: Usually round in diameter;
*Leaves: Mostly without hairs, without glands, and smooth (entire) margins. Mid-vein or top may have some hairs; and
*Berries: Deep purplish, bluish, or black.

Potential specimens should be provided to and verified at one of our State Herbaria:
University of Montana (MONTU), Montana State University (MONT), or Montana State University-Billings (MSUB).

Coniferous woods and adjacent areas, peaty slopes (Vander Kloet in FNA 2009).

POLLINATORS
The following animal species have been reported as pollinators of this plant species or its genus where their geographic ranges overlap: Bombus vagans, Bombus appositus, Bombus centralis, Bombus fervidus, Bombus flavifrons, Bombus frigidus, Bombus melanopygus, Bombus mixtus, Bombus nevadensis, Bombus rufocinctus, Bombus ternarius, Bombus sitkensis, Bombus occidentalis, Bombus pensylvanicus, Bombus bimaculatus, Bombus griseocollis, Bombus impatiens, Bombus insularis, Bombus bohemicus, and Bombus flavidus (Heinrich 1976, Thorp et al. 1983, MacKenzie and Averill 1995, Stubbs and Drummond 2001, Ratti et al. 2008, Colla and Dumesh 2010, Colla and Ratti 2010, Colla et al. 2011, Williams et al. 2014).