Little salmon-colored flashes can be seen peeking through low-lying grasses, usually beginning in March and going through September. This is scarlet pimpernel, or Anagallis arvensis. Often it can be seen growing in grassy fields, road-cuts or trailsides along with a visual cacophony of other tiny flowers. It’s striking among them because it’s five petals are such a distinctive color, darkening into a rosy central ring around pinkish stamen. Because it’s everywhere, it’s an easy childhood favorite – at least, it was one of mine. So it was a sad grown-up realization to learn this little bloom is not native… But at least we have the comfort that it isn’t listed as “invasive”, meaning that although it didn’t originate from hereabouts, at least it isn’t doing much in the way of damage to the local species now that it has arrived.
Tag Archives: Botany
Plant of the day: scarlet pimpernel
Filed under Non-native, Plant of the day
Plant of the day: blue eyed grass
Sisyrinchium bellum, and isn’t it just? Bellum, that is. Or bellisima. On just about every springtime walk you take in Marin you’ll see these striking dark blue/purple flowers so they are a good one to know. Blue eyed grass are almost always blue, though once, last year, I found a pale morph (photo included below). Though they have five regular petals, they are in the iridaceae family along with iris. I see the similarity most in the way the uppermost leaves form a crisscrossing sheath (or “spathe valve“?) around the bottom of the flower.
Filed under Good for gardens, Native, Plant of the day
Plant of the day: checker bloom
An unexpected spray of pink caught my eye along the trail. Here is a checker bloom (or checker mallow) – scientific name Sidalcea malviflora. This showy flower can be found throughout most of California, and is pretty in a sculptural way that makes it look more like a cultivated variety than a wildflower. It can grow up to a foot tall, and sometimes grows en masse in open fields — or scattered singly or in small groups, as I saw it. The flowers are about an inch across, and each vibrantly pink petal is nearly translucent and streaked with numerous pale lines. The white stamens form a fused, fringed tube at the center. Each bloom unfurls above its older neighbor on a long raceme. At any time several are usually in bloom while a cluster of green buds hangs above them, waiting for their turn in the sun. Checker bloom has several other cousins in Marin, all of which look pretty similar, but this is the most common and widespread throughout the state. They are in the Malvaceae family – the fused, fringed male filaments are one of the key ways (“diagnostics”, in botany-speak) to recognize this family.
Filed under Native, Plant of the day
The key to it all
So I was telling a friend about this blog, and I mentioned that I had keyed out one of the plants that I didn’t know – and she asked me what it means to “key”. So if you’re a veteran botanist, forgive me. But if you are a newbie, here it is: a plant key is a book of all the plants in an area, and it consists of a very long set of either-or questions. If you patiently (and correctly) follow the trail of questions along, eventually it will lead you to the only plant that has all of the characteristics that your plant has. A key is full of all sorts of obscure terminology like awn, bract, fusiform, and stolon. You also will stumble across common words that, in the context of the key, have specific meanings – like scale, or ray – which don’t mean at all what they do in the rest of the world. Back when I was in college, my botany-student friends and I would get together at parties, and as the beers went by we would have increasingly passionate conversations about some class or another. My roomate always loved hanging out with us, because he could make jokes later about how we were speaking an incomprehensible language. But that’s botany – you have to learn the language, and then it’s loads of fun.
Here in Marin, the two keys that are most important are the Jepson Manual – which is the definitive key for the state – and the Marin Flora, which narrows down the number of choices by a lot, since you are only having to consider plants that are actually found in this county. Also handy is the Peterson Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers, which is a guidebook, not a key, but has a lot of the more common plants which you can look them up according to color and flower type.
To key a flower, you’ll need a good hand lens (high powered magnifying glass) and maybe a pair of tweezers.
Filed under Botany basics
Plant of the day: miner’s lettuce
This unassuming little plant is common in moist areas and in forest understories. Claytonia perfoliata also doubles as a tasty trailside snack, with a pleasantly plump and crisp leaf. The taste is mild and green, somewhere between spinach and lettuce. Native Americans and early western settlers ate it regularly, but now it is more of a novelty nibble.
Filed under Edible, Native, Plant of the day
Pumpkin ridge stroll
If you’re an outdoorsy type who somehow has not been up on the Marin Municipal Water District lands yet, I can’t recommend it enough. If you’ve been to Phoenix Lake or the back side of Mt. Tam, you’ve been on part of their 18,000 acres of watershed land without realizing it. I like to go in the Sky Oaks entrance, where you have the choice of walking by one of the many reservoir lakes, heading down a sociable fire road, or cutting off onto one of the many small trails to be (mostly) alone with some spectacular nature. There are 130 miles of trails and fire roads on MMWD land, so you can spend a LOT of time there. Today I went out the Pumpkin Ridge Trail, which passes in and out of live oak forest that is interspersed with meadows. The forest is in sad shape these days because of Sudden Oak Death, so dead branches litter the
ground. But the understory was still vibrant, with lots of iris and houndstongue. And the meadows are lovely – filled with wildflowers at this time of year. Along the way I embarrassed myself by not being able to remember the Latin names of miniature lupine, blue-eyed grass, or California poppy (which I even wrote about yesterday!). Those are Lupinus bicolor, Sisyrinchium bellum, and Eschscholtzia californica, by the way.
Filed under TRAIL NOTES
Plant of the day: Chinese houses
Collinsia heterophylla, or Chinese houses, is a pretty little flower with multicolored purple flowers stacked in whorls. Each flower has two bright purple bottom petals that sandwich a third spurlike petal that points toward the ground like the keel on a ship. This petal is actually a pouch, and the reproductive organs (stamens and pistil) are stowed away inside. The two upper petals are a pale lavendar, decorated with a burgandy pattern of dots. On my specimen those formed a line, arching over the mouth of an inner chamber that – when pried open – proved to be lined with pale hairs.
Collinsia is in the Plantaginaceae family, which didn’t exist back when I was learning my plants. That’s the thing about botany – as science progresses, names are changed to indicate our changing understanding of different species’ relationship to one another. So what now is Plantaginaceae once was Scrophulariaceae, which still exists but just with fewer members. Anyway many of the species found in the Plantaginaceae family are assymmetrical, like this one. Snapdragons are also notable members of the Plantaginaceae, but I’m getting a bit off-topic here.
Chinese houses tend to like open, brushy or wooded slopes in partial shade, according to the guidebook, but I saw it growing on a hot, rocky landslide face that the trail cut across.
Filed under Native, Plant of the day
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.
Filed under TRAIL NOTES
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.
Filed under Botany basics
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.
Filed under Plant of the day
Flowers Of Marin 
