Official State Flowers of the United States

Artemisia tridentata - Big Sagebrush

Artemisia tridentata – Big Sagebrush

State Flower of Nevada – Nevada designated sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata or trifida) as the official state flower in 1917. One of Nevada’s nicknames is “The Sagebrush State.”

Sagebrush (also called big sagebrush, common sagebrush, blue sagebrush, or black sagebrush) is a coarse, hardy, silvery gray-green bush that grows in the desert southwest of the United States. Big sagebrush is a coarse, many-branched, pale-grey shrub with yellow flowers and silvery-grey foliage, which is generally 0.53 m tall.9 A deep taproot 4 m in length, coupled with laterally spreading roots near the surface, allows sagebrush to gather water from both surface precipitation and the water table several meters beneath. Big sagebrush that is over a meter tall is an indicator of arable land, because it prefers deep, basic soils. Sagebrush is generally long-lived once it makes it past the seedling stage, and can reach ages of over 100 years. The species has a strong pungent fragrance (especially when wet) due to the presence of camphor, terpenoids and other volatile oils. The taste is bitter and, together with the odor, serves to discourage browsing by many herbivores. It is an evergreen shrub, keeping some of its leaves year-round (although it loses many of them in the late summer). The leaves attached to the branches at the axillary nodesare wedge-shaped, 3 cm long and 0.3 cm broad, with the wider outer tips divided into three lobes (hence the scientific name tridentata).34 The leaves are covered with fine silvery hairs.
Native Americans used the leaves of sagebrush for medicine and sagebrush bark for weaving mats.