Post Your Wildflower Pics Here

For bp2go. Desert Peach at Mono Lake and, yes, there are peach blooming at Monitor Pass...at least at the bottom

Shooting Star from my front yard


Carex buxbaumii


Dutchman's Breeches

Found a new county record of Lonicera reticulata this weekend. 



Also from that day
Daisy Fleabane


And my favorite plant common name: Bastard Toadflax

I recently purchased some extension tubes for my camera and spent my usual Sunday morning coffee/photography walk around the house playing with some macro photography. I wasn't aware of how shallow the depth of field would be but I'm learning. I want to get this down before I head to the mountains.

A busy bee.


Some sort of dragon fly. They don't like having their photo taken.


I'm not sure what this is. It's growing in our pond and closes itself at night.


Frog Fruit and the entire head of this one is about the size of a dime. 

It's called Salsify, also called oyster plant because pioneers decided the roots tasted like..., oh, why spoil the surprise?

They do come in other colors, but yellow is the default! They grow pretty much everywhere, which explains why a California guy knows them. Bonus Factoid: The botanical name is Tragopogon. Trago=throat, pogon=goat, so Goat beard! I suppose that's because the seed heads are big fluffy ball of seeds like a dandelion No surprise, they are both in the Sunflower family. And dandelion is a corrupted French dent-de-lion, lion's tooth. Look at the leaves!

See? Geeky plant stuff can be fun.

Watch out, I see an opening. I will tell you from personal experience, it is not too hard to get a basic understanding of how to look at a new flower and put it into a plant Family. Plant Families are set apart by common characteristics. Then within the family, the next step is Genera (singular Genus), and finally it comes down to Species, based on Specific details of a plant within the Genus.

I suppose that was clear as mud, but a good way to start is to find a used copy of Peterson's Guide to Wildflowers of (name of your region), or look for the humorously named Botany in a Day. In a day? Uh, dream on. The first easy step is to get familiar with the main characteristics: how many petals, how many stamens and sepals, etc. There are excellent illustrations in either book that you can study to soon "see" flowers as a member of a specific Family. Worth mentioning, the Salsify (and dandelion) are both in the Sunflower family (Asteraceae) and that family is where most botanists sort of give up! Very tricky to ID, so you can still recognize a general family member.

...time to back away before I really go geeky!