Woodland beardtongue is a leafy wildflower of shady mountain forests that blooms through the summer with loose, branching sprays of rosy purple, tube-shaped flowers. It was long counted among the penstemons and still looks like one, but botanists now place it in a separate genus, Nothochelone.
It is at home in the forest understory at middle elevations and on moist forest edges and slopes up into the subalpine. Its stems rise one to three feet from a woody base and taproot, so the same clump comes back each year. The leaves grow in pairs along the stem, with none clustered at the base, and they are thin and sharply toothed.
Lean in for a closer look at a flower. Each one is two-lipped, with the lower lip much longer than the upper, and the outside is covered in fine glandular hairs. Inside are four fertile stamens with very woolly anthers and a shorter sterile stamen coated in tan to orange hairs. The branching flower stalks carry glands too. Look for it on shaded trailsides and in openings of mid-elevation forest on Mt. Hood from early to late summer.
How to identify it
A leafy perennial about 1 to 3 feet tall. All leaves grow in pairs on the stem; they are thin, lance- to egg-shaped, 1.5 to 4.5 inches long and sharply toothed. Flowers come in branched, glandular clusters; each is a pinkish purple, two-lipped tube about 1 to 1.3 inches long, glandular-hairy outside, with densely woolly anthers.
Look-alikes
Cascade penstemon has deep blue to dark purple flowers packed into compact clusters at the stem tips and grows mostly in moist meadows and forest openings. Woodland beardtongue's flowers are rosy pink-purple, larger, and carried in loose, branching sprays.
Habitat
Forest understory at middle elevations, and moist forest edges and slopes up into the subalpine, on both sides of the Cascade crest.
Sightings in the forest
536 research-grade sightings in Mt. Hood National Forest on iNaturalist, most recently on October 11, 2026. See them on iNaturalist →