How Plants Got to Montana: Orchards, Shelterbelts, and the Ones That Got Away

Almost nothing growing in Montana is from Montana.

Your lawn is from Europe and Asia. The caragana hedge down the county road is from Siberia. The crabapple in your neighbor's yard, the one that blooms in late May and smells like the whole state just woke up, descends from stock that crossed an ocean and then a continent to get within a hundred miles of you. Every plant in your yard was carried here by somebody, and almost none of the people carrying them knew whether it would work.

That is the thing worth understanding about Montana's landscape. It was not assembled by climate. It was assembled by people making bets. Some of those bets paid off so well that the trees are still standing. Some of them paid off so well that we now spend public money trying to kill them.

This is the story of how the plants got here, and it runs through the orchards, the shelterbelts, and the ones that got away.

The first orchard in Montana has a date problem

Start with the most-repeated fact in Montana horticulture, because it is also the one that is wrong.

The earliest documented orchard in the state was planted near Stevensville by Fathers Ravalli and DeSmet, in the late 1840s, part of the St. Mary's Mission work in the Bitterroot Valley. That much is solid. You will also read, in a hundred places, that Father Ravalli planted Montana's first apple tree in 1845. That specific year is folklore. Montana State University's own history of the mission orchard does not give an exact year. It says the late 1840s, and it stops there.

So why does 1845 keep showing up? Because 1845 is a better story than "sometime in the late 1840s." A precise year is memorable, it is quotable, and once it is in print it gets copied forward without anyone re-checking. Every retelling launders it a little cleaner. Folklore in horticulture works like that. A tidy detail outcompetes an honest uncertainty, and forty years later the tidy detail is "known." Nobody sets out to spread it. This is not a small thing, because a wrong year sits at the head of a story about the first orchard in the state, and most people who repeat it have no way of knowing it came from nowhere.

Ask yourself which version you would rather repeat.

It matters here for one practical reason. If you are going to trust a Montana gardening claim, you need to know which claims have a source behind them and which ones have only a nice-sounding year. The mission orchard has a source. The year 1845 does not.

And it matters for a second reason. The missionaries were not planting apples because Bitterroot Valley soil is ideal for fruit. They were planting them because a mission that intends to stay needs food, and an apple keeps through a Montana winter in a way that most fruit does not. The first orchard in this state was a survival decision, and it happened to land in one of the few spots in Montana where a fruit tree has a real chance: a valley with a mild microclimate and a slope to plant on.

The Basses of Pine Grove Farm — and the trees that died trying

The missionaries proved apples would grow. The Bass brothers proved apples would sell.

Around 1870, the Basses planted Pine Grove Farm near Stevensville. Same valley, better business plan. They took their first Duchess of Oldenburg crop in 1877, seven years of waiting for a single harvest. And in 1890 they shipped their first carload of apples. That is the moment Bitterroot fruit stopped being a family's food supply and started being a Montana export — the opening chapter of how the commercial orchards rose and fell.

The cultivars they documented are worth naming, because they tell you exactly what survived the climate they were testing:

Read that list again and notice what it has in common. Every one of them is hardy. The Basses were not collecting the best-tasting apples in America. They were collecting the ones that would not die, and they got there the way every Montana gardener gets there, by losing trees first.

Which brings us to the part of the story that anyone who has planted a fruit tree in this state will recognize immediately. Early Montana orchardists mail-ordered trees from Oregon, Washington, Utah, New York, and even Plymouth, Massachusetts. They ordered what the catalogs offered, the catalogs offered what grew in milder places, and most of those trees winterkilled, dead to the ground in their first or second winter, the money gone, the wait wasted.

That is the same mistake a homeowner makes today when they buy a zone-6 Japanese maple because it looked beautiful in a photograph. The catalog does not know your ground. The Basses learned to ignore it.

They also learned the trick that our Montana growing-zones explainer is built around: the right ground beats the right plant. Fruit trees do not go in valley bottoms, because cold air drains downhill and pools on the floor, so a Bitterroot Valley orchard in the bottom of the draw freezes harder than one twenty feet up the slope, and above that cold pool sits the thermal belt, the mid-slope band that stays warmer all winter.

That band is exactly where Montana's historic orchards were sited. The Basses were not lucky. They were reading the terrain.

The windbreak era: Clarke–McNary, 1924

Apples are one kind of bet. Windbreaks are a different one, and they reshaped more of Montana than any orchard did.

The organized windbreak era in this state begins with the Clarke–McNary Act, signed in June 1924, federal legislation that gave the work a framework, a funding stream, and a reason to be systematic. What Montana State University's 1937 bulletin Shelter Belts for Montana, by E.E. Isaac, records is how it actually ran on the ground: a state nursery established under section 4 of the act, with stock grown at the School of Forestry in Missoula and distributed through Extension out of Bozeman.

Sit with that detail. The trees that now line thousands of Montana farmsteads, the caragana rows, the ash windbreaks, the poplars along the section road, came from a nursery in Missoula, handed out through an office in Bozeman, to farmers who needed a reason to stop the wind.

The species list from that 1937 bulletin tells you what the era was trying to do:

• Caragana: the do-everything shelterbelt shrub
• Box elder
• Russian olive
• Green ash and American elm
• Chinese elm
• Poplars
• Ponderosa pine, spruces, and native juniper

Some of those choices look better in hindsight than others. Even in 1937, Isaac's bulletin was not selling a fantasy. It warned about aphis on American elm, and it said plainly that borers had made ash "no longer justifiable" as a recommendation. The bulletin's own authors were disqualifying their list, in print, ninety years before "deer-resistant doesn't mean deer-proof" became the modern version of the same honesty.

What they could not have known was how that list would age. Half a century later, one entry on it, Russian olive, would be a regulated species in the state it was planted to protect. We will come back to that. That is the "got away" part of the story, and what Montana's invasive plants did next is the other half of it.

Read that list against Montana's soils and a second thing shows up. Under the state's alkaline, high-pH conditions, iron chlorosis, which shows as yellow leaves with green veins, strikes apple, maple, and poplar, while ash, boxelder, elm, and oak tolerate it. Whoever assembled the 1937 list was quietly choosing for alkaline ground, whether or not they said so in those words.

What Montana was not part of

Now the correction that matters, because you will find it stated wrong on a great many pages, including some that should know better.

Montana was not part of the Prairie States Forestry Project.

The Prairie States Forestry Project is the shelterbelt program most people mean when they say the government planted shelterbelts in the 1930s. It ran from 1935 to 1942, and it covered only the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Montana is not on that list. If you read that Montana was included in the New Deal shelterbelt program, the page you are reading is wrong.

Montana worked instead with the USDA's Northern Great Plains Field Station at Mandan, North Dakota, a different institutional arrangement for a different set of conditions. It is an easy error to make, because "the Dust Bowl shelterbelt program" sounds like it should have covered the whole northern plains, and Montana is in the northern plains. But the program followed a specific set of conditions and a specific map. Montana was not on it.

Why does this matter to a gardener? Because it tells you that Montana's windbreak tradition grew out of research stations and MSU bulletins, not out of the Dust Bowl emergency. That is a different lineage, and it is the reason Montana shelterbelt advice has a distinct character, closer to a state Extension tradition than to a federal disaster response.

Where the trees actually came from: the nursery trade

Between the missionaries and the federal nursery sat a private trade that most Montanans have never heard of, and it did more to shape the state's ornamental landscape than either.

State Nursery & Seed Co. in Helena operated from 1888 to 2001, one hundred and thirteen years, founded by Thomas E. Mills. A lifetime and a half of supplying this state with the trees, shrubs, and seed it planted. Geneva Nurseries was advertising in the Rocky Mountain Husbandman as early as 1879. The earliest trace of it is a newspaper advertisement, and a newspaper advertisement is a thin hook to hang a nursery on. It is also exactly how much of this history survives: whatever happened to be printed and kept.

And then the institution that eventually replaced the guesswork with research: the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station began on 1 July 1893, under the Hatch Act, the federal law that funded agricultural research at land-grant colleges and is the reason MSU Extension can tell you today what actually survives here.

The thread runs all the way to the present. The Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation's Conservation Seedling Nursery dates to 1927, a state nursery that is still in operation, and still selling source-identified native seedlings. That last detail is the whole arc of this article in miniature. In 1879, Montanans were ordering trees from back east and watching them die, and in 2026, nearly a century and a half later, you can buy a seedling whose point of origin is documented, because we finally learned that where a plant is from predicts whether it lives.

The ones that got away

Here is the payoff, and it is the reason this page exists.

Every plant in the sections above was brought here on purpose, by someone who thought it was a good idea. Three of them turned out to be so good at living here that the state now regulates them. This is not a story about careless people. It is a story about how hard it is to predict what a plant will do a century later, and about why the choices we make now deserve the same scrutiny.

Russian olive is the sharpest example, because it was recommended by the government for the exact purpose it failed at. It was promoted for windbreaks, it is on the 1937 list, and it is now Priority 3 regulated in Montana and one of only three focal species in the state's 2025 statewide woody-invasive plan. Even the introduction date is contested. NRCS says the early 1900s. The Montana Russian Olive/Saltcedar Strategy says the 1800s, brought by Russian immigrants. Both accounts are in circulation, and we are not going to pretend the disagreement does not exist. What is not disputed is the outcome. A shrub planted to hold soil is now something counties can compel you to remove.

The practical mechanism behind that compulsion is worth knowing, because almost nobody writes about it. Under MCA 7-22-2116, it is unlawful to permit noxious weeds to propagate or go to seed on your land. The county sends certified-mail notice. The owner gets 10 days to respond. If they do not comply, the county can do the work and bill cost plus a 25% penalty. Our guide to Montana's noxious weed rules and what the county can require of you walks through what that means for a homeowner.

Common buckthorn tells the same story with a longer fuse. It arrived in North America in the late 1700s and naturalized quietly through hedgerows, the exact use it was brought for. It reached Montana's noxious list in 2017, and is now reported in 27 Montana counties.

Two centuries between introduction and regulation.

Saltcedar was planted for streambank erosion control. It is now Priority 3 regulated, and the third of the three focal woody species in the 2025 plan.

And one more, which isn't an escape so much as a reversal in judgment. Juniper. Native juniper was on the 1937 recommended shelterbelt list, and it is a perfectly good plant in the right place. It is also, by a wide margin, the most flammable plant any Montana homeowner is likely to put near a house, a gasoline wick in a defensible space. If you are in a wildfire zone, that is covered in our page on why juniper doesn't belong in your defensible space.

The species did not change. Our understanding of where it belongs did.

Notice the pattern, because it is the lesson. Every one of these plants was a reasonable decision made with the information available at the time. Russian olive held a windbreak. Buckthorn made a hedge. Saltcedar held a bank. Nobody in 1937 was being reckless. They were solving a problem in front of them, and the cost showed up on somebody else's ledger eighty years later.

Frequently asked questions

Did Father Ravalli plant Montana's first apple tree in 1845?

Nothing verifiable puts an apple tree in the ground in that year. The earliest documented orchard in Montana was planted by Fathers Ravalli and DeSmet near Stevensville in the late 1840s, and MSU's own history of that orchard gives no exact year. The 1845 date is folklore, and it spread because a precise year travels further than an honest range.

What was Montana's first commercial orchard?

Pine Grove Farm, planted by the Bass brothers near Stevensville around 1870. They took their first Duchess of Oldenburg crop in 1877 and shipped their first carload of apples in 1890. Their documented cultivars, Duchess of Oldenburg, Red McIntosh, Alexander, Northwest Greening, Bethel, and the Transcendent and Hyslop crabapples, were all chosen for hardiness, not flavor alone.

Why did so many early Montana fruit trees die?

Winterkill. Early orchardists mail-ordered trees from Oregon, Washington, Utah, New York, and Plymouth, Massachusetts, and most of that stock winterkilled in Montana's cold. The trees were bred for milder climates and went into the ground without regard to the winter they would face. Montana's hardy-fruit tradition grew out of that failure. See our guide to which trees actually earn their space in a Montana yard for what replaced the lost ones.

Was Montana part of the 1930s shelterbelt program?

No. The Prairie States Forestry Project ran from 1935 to 1942 and covered only the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Montana worked instead with the USDA's Northern Great Plains Field Station at Mandan, North Dakota. Montana's own organized windbreak era began earlier, with the Clarke–McNary Act of June 1924 and the state nursery established under it.

What's the most invasive plant in Montana?

Montana doesn't rank invasives that way, but the state's 2025 statewide woody-invasive plan names only three focal species: Russian olive, common buckthorn, and saltcedar, all three introduced on purpose, two as windbreak or erosion-control plantings. Russian olive and saltcedar are Priority 3 regulated; buckthorn is Priority 2A, added in 2017 and now reported in 27 counties.

The plants you choose become somebody's problem — or somebody's orchard

Two things survived from the Bitterroot's first century of fruit: the hardy cultivars the Basses kept, and the lesson that most of the trees they tried did not.

Two things survived from the shelterbelt era: thousands of miles of windbreak that still cut the wind across this state, and a shrub that went from recommendation to regulation inside one lifetime.

This page anchors our Montana plant history coverage, the shelterbelt era, the orchard story, the nursery trade, and the species that escaped all here, with the rest of the cluster hanging off it.

The plants we choose today become the landscape of the next century, and sometimes the problem of it. That is not a reason to plant nothing. It is a reason to plant deliberately, and to prefer the species that belong here: the ones that evolved alongside Montana's soils, its frosts, its chinook winds, and its pollinators, and that do not need to be managed into submission a hundred years from now — the same plants the first peoples of this region were already using long before anyone planted a yard. If you want to know what is on that list, start with Montana's native plants.

And if you are not sure what will grow where you are, or which of Montana's wildly different valleys you are actually gardening in, the answer starts with your region, not with a plant.

Not sure what will grow where you are? Find your Montana growing region.