Narrowleaf Gentian Gentiana linearis
Narrowleaf Gentian is a perennial wildflower native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It blooms Aug – Sep.
More about this plant
Gentiana linearis, the narrowleaf gentian, is a 1–2 ft (30–61 cm) tall flowering plant in the Gentianaceae family. It is native to northeastern North America from Manitoba to Maine, and to the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Similar to the "bottle gentians" like Gentiana clausa and Gentiana andrewsii, it has paired, lanceolate leaves, usually on unbranched stalks, and blue or purple blooms which remain closed or nearly closed; the leaves are narrower however, as the specific name indicates. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Flower colour
- Blue AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~1 caterpillar species
Gentiana supports ~1 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Gentiana in North America, including:
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Narrowleaf Gentian :
Related plants
More Gentiana →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (20) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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