The lovely pale lavender flowers of the Graham's penstemon, with their magenta-striped throats and fiery orange staminodes, make this little plant such a delight that it has been featured on the cover of more than one book. But this is no delicate wildflower - it is only found on oil shale barrens where most other plants could never withstand the blazing heat reflected from the surrounding white shale fragments. Unfortunately, as well adapted as Graham's penstemon is to these harsh environments, it doesn't stand a chance against oil and gas drilling and exploration activities, off-road vehicles, or livestock trampling. Because this species is only found in the Uinta Basin of Utah and northwestern Colorado, and only on economically valuable oil shales, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has maintained Graham's penstemon as a Candidate for Endangered Species Act protection since 1976, but it still has never granted it these protections. Most sites are owned by the Bureau of Land Management, which as of 2002 had never even revisited many of the populations since they were first inventoried in 1979, and which refers to the Uinta Basin as "Utah's oil patch". We petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to finally give this species the protections that even the Service acknowledges it requires, and asked them to do it on an emergency basis.  After years of delay, the Service proposed its intention to do so later this year.