April 20, 2012 · 10:03 pm

Cascade Canyon

I took my dogsitting charges and headed out into the hottest day of the year so far, out onto the Cascade Canyon Open Space preserve in Fairfax. There were lots of flowers in bloom, most of them very common. My list that I came home with had 34 plants on it, and I could only provide full Latin names for three – three! Pepperwood (Umbellularia californica), madrone (Arbutus mensiezii) and Douglas iris (Iris douglasii). It’s true that for many others I could at least come up with the genus name – but still, this is worse than I thought it would be.

There was one plant that I couldn’t identify at all until I keyed it out, and so that is my plant of the day. It turned out to be Chinese houses (Collinsia heterophylla). Read all about it in the next post.

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April 20, 2012 · 9:51 pm

A note on capitalization

So if you’re going to be a botanist, one thing to pay attention to is capitalization. For common names, the first letter in a list or sentence is capitalized, but otherwise only proper names are capitalized. Like so: California poppy, rattlesnake grass, and spinster’s blue-eyed Mary. Madrone would be capitalized only at the start of a sentence.

For scientific or Latin names, the species name always consists of two words – the genus name and the species name. The genus is always capitalized, and the species (and subspecies, if there is one) never are. Also, both are often italicized. So the above list would read like so: Eschscholzia californica, Briza maxima, and Collinsia sparsiflora.

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April 20, 2012 · 9:23 pm

A work in progress

From the time I was a kid, I’ve been a casual botanist. I couldn’t help it really – my parents were always keying flowers and quizzing me to see if I remembered their names. After a time dabbling in art, I went to college where I earned an undergraduate degree in botany – a decade ago, in a different state. For a while I even used my degree professionally, but then life took a different course. Since moving home to California I’ve been frustrated by how hard it is to learn the local flora without the discipline of work or school to help me out. But this spring, I’ve decided to get serious. I’ll learn one new plant a day, that’s the goal. And if you like, you can come along on the ride with me.

My method will surely change, but for now the plan consists of two steps. First, pick a plant every day and learn its common and scientific name. Second, take a notebook with me when I go out hiking. In it I will identify as many plants as I can, by whatever name I can. If I can learn a new plant or two while I’m out, even better.  The idea is that I will see the number and detail of my identifications go up as time goes on.

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