Thin Air Harvest Practical gardening for the high, dry West

Plants

High-plains plants for Wyoming and Montana

Wind, hail, chinooks, and alkaline prairie soils. Grasses and shrubs that fit Cheyenne, Casper, Billings, and the open eastern plains.

By the Thin Air Harvest editorial team. Updated November 1, 2026.

The high plains east of the Rockies are a wind climate with a garden attached. Cheyenne’s airport sits near 6,060 feet. The University of Wyoming Extension spring freeze table puts the median last 32°F date there at May 12, and the 1-in-10 late date at May 26.

Laramie’s median in that table is June 7. Billings, lower and to the north, has a median last 32°F date of May 4 in the Montana table hosted by Montana State University Extension, with a late date of May 17.

These towns share wind, hail, a wide temperature swing, and soils that are often alkaline. They do not share a frost date. The Wyoming and Montana calendar keeps the numbers. This page keeps the plants.

A planting that works here keeps its growing point low, bends in wind, resprouts after hail, and does not depend on a wet, acid, sheltered forest soil. Arborvitae sheared into a green wall fails that test. It browns in winter wind, splits under snow, and was borrowed from a different biome. The replacement is not “no plants.” It is the steppe palette.

Grasses first

Blue grama and buffalo grass, described as lawns in water-wise lawns, are prairie grasses before they are lawn products. On the high plains they are also the matrix of a border: blue grama as a low sod or a tuft, little bluestem as the vertical accent, and the space between them for flowers.

They want sun. A windbreak’s shady lee is a different planting than the open south side. Do not seed buffalo grass into a snow fence’s permanent shade.

These grasses tan. On the plains that color is the late-summer landscape. If you water them into permanent June green, you are growing a different, thirstier plant community and inviting weeds that like the water. Establish them, then let the dry weeks happen.

Shrubs of the steppe

Rubber rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa) handles wind, poor soil, and late bloom. It is the September pollinator plant of the high plains. It will seed. Put it in the rough ground, not in a tiny irrigated circle.

Fringed sage (Artemisia frigida) is a native silver that stays low and takes the wind. Winterfat (Krascheninnikovia lanata) is a native shrub of alkaline plains, more common in restoration than in ornamental nurseries, and worth asking for if you are planting a larger lot.

Yucca (Yucca glauca), the small soapweed of the plains, belongs in dry, well-drained ground. It is a regional native in much of this country. It is not a license to plant any large yucca from a desert catalog and expect the same hardiness.

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) is the dominant shrub of huge areas and a poor choice next to a foundation, where its size and its dislike of summer water both become problems. Admire it on the land. Do not irrigate it like a lilac.

Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) and serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia) are the native woody plants that also feed people and birds. They take wind better than a hybrid tea rose, they can be part of a windward planting, and they are discussed as fruit on the small-fruit page. In a windbreak they should be one species among several, not a monoculture that a single disease can remove.

Flowers that come back after hail

Blanketflower, Rocky Mountain penstemon where drainage exists, and prairie coneflower types are the perennial layer. Their crowns sit at or below the soil surface. A June hailstorm that strips the blooms does not end the plant.

That is the design criterion. A tall dahlia, a delphinium staked to a pole, and a potted geranium are color for a week. They are not the bones of a Cheyenne border.

Penstemons rot in improved, watered clay. On the plains, the native ones want the leaner spot, the slope, the gravelly edge. If your only bed is a heavily composted vegetable garden, grow the vegetables there and put the penstemon in a separate, drier strip. Clay timing still applies to the vegetable half.

Windbreaks are plantings, not walls

A windbreak belongs on the windward side, and it should be porous. A solid fence or a single row of one tight shrub creates turbulence and a snow drift in the wrong place. NRCS windbreak practice is built on that porosity, with protection extending downwind a distance related to the height of the barrier.

The garden-scale version is on the wind page. Species for a high-plains windbreak should be plants that already live in wind: native juniper where it is appropriate and not a fire hazard against the house, chokecherry, serviceberry, lilac only as a known tough non-native if you accept its suckering, and grasses at the base.

Avoid a wall of arborvitae. Avoid Russian olive. It is a weed of riparian places and a gift you do not want to give the next draw.

Snow fence, the slatted kind, can protect a vegetable garden or a young windbreak while the plants are short.

It is a tool for three years, not the finished landscape.

Chinooks and winter color

A chinook is a warm, dry wind that drops off the mountains and can push a winter day above freezing, then leave. Plants that broke dormancy in that warmth get hit by the next cold. Woody plants with a southern exposure suffer this most.

Idaho’s bulletin on harsh-climate woody plants describes the same trap: a south wall helps a vegetable and can injure an evergreen by swinging the temperature and drying the tissue. On the high plains, put the vegetable frame on the south side of the house and put the evergreen windbreak where it shades itself a little, or where it is not against reflective siding.

Winter watering, when the ground is dry and a mild day lets you run a hose, matters more here than another bag of fertilizer. Desiccation kills as many plains evergreens as the absolute low does.

A bed that looks like the plains and still feeds you

The ornamental palette and the kitchen garden can share a yard without sharing a watering zone. Put the rabbitbrush, the grama, and the penstemon on the driest valve.

Put the lettuce and the peas on drip near the door, inside a rabbit fence, with a snow fence or a shrub line on the windward side. The mistake is one rotor sprinkler that tries to keep bluegrass, blanketflower, and chard equally happy.

The chard bolts or rots, the penstemon collapses, and the grass never quite thickens. Xeriscaping is the sequence. The plains palette is what you plug into the low-water zone.

If you want cut flowers, grow them as a row inside the vegetable fence, not as the permanent face of the yard. Zinnias and dahlias are a summer purchase. They are not a substitute for the grasses that will be there in March when the perennials are still asleep and the wind is looking for bare soil.

Leave the grass stems up through winter. They catch snow, feed birds, and protect their own crowns. Cut them back in spring when the new growth is visible, not in October out of a sense of tidiness borrowed from a wetter climate.

Checklist

Mountain valleys in western Montana and the Yellowstone high country are colder and snowier than the open plains. Use the mountain-town logic for those, not a Cheyenne shrub list copied into a June-frost basin.

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