Wonderful Wildflowers of the Altai Mountains and Hustai National Park
Oxytropis pseudoglandulosa with a view
Oxytropis pseudoglandulosa close up
While my husband’s main excitement was the fishing (see last post here), I was more interested in the flowers. Despite the days still being very cold everything seemed to be coming into bloom. As we were riding, it wasn’t always easy to stop and get off my horse to use my SLR, but I have tried my best to photograph a fraction of what we saw. For my friends there was a lot of looking at this:
My photographing flowers – courtesy of Helen Mayhew
Some of the flowers were familiar versions of flowers used either ornamentally in the UK or which I had seen in alpine areas before, while others were completely new. I have tried my best to identify the flowers but any help or corrections would be greatly appreciated! For example, this one below had leaves that smelled of Lavender, but I have no idea what it was. Sometimes the scent was wonderful – for example as the horses plodded through meadows of a low alpine artemisia.
unknown
Primula farinosa
Two different (?) types of alpine poppies:
Papaver
Papaver
Some kind of marsh Orchid near the lake – what type?
Oxytropis oxyphylla covered in dew in the early morning
Leontopodium ochroleucum
At over 2,500 meters the mountains were covered in carpets of small wildflowers
At close to 3,000 meters the scenery was very bleak and rocky and yet little tufts of blooms were everywhere. Poor things must have got a bit of a shock with the blizzard we had later! 
Little clumps of white flowers everywhere. Name?
Again – name?
Flowery meadows on our penultimate day up a river valley near the Chinese border
Up near the waterfall we saw lots of different flowers unique to the more protected larch filled valleys. Due to being on horseback, I unfortunately missed getting decent photos though we did see Gentianas, Violas (pansies), Myosotis (Forget-me-nots), Achillea (Yarrow), Ribes (red currant bushes), and Thymus amongst many others.
Orostachys malocophylla? or something in the Stonecrop family
After we flew back to Ulan Bator the adventure wasn’t quite over and we headed to Hustai National Park (two hours outside of UB) for two final days of riding. Photos to come in the next post. What I hadn’t anticipated was again there being such wealth of wildflowers – although very different from the Altai – more large herbaceous plants rather than tiny alpine clumps. I just had to keep hopping on and off my horse to get some of these!
Lilium pumilum
Linum sibiricum
Some type of Limonium
Some type of Potentilla?
Veronica incana
fields filled with Scutellaria scordifolia
Some of my favourites were when this blue butterfly (name?) landed on an Allium and some grass fronds. He was quite amenable, fluttering around and letting me get some nice photos. 
Any comments on helping me with flower or butterfly names would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Pretty pictures of the flowers.
Gorgeous! Thanks for sharing.
An artist friend in Amsterdam call Butterflies ´flying flowers´ and this little blue person is stunning as is the landscape.