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.
Tag Archives: Flora
Plant of the day: poison oak
How about an easy one for a Monday! Common and important, unless you want to itch. Poison oak is easy/hard to identify, depending on how experienced you are in looking at plants. The leaves can range in color from dark green to light green to reddish, but they always have a glossy shine and another quality as well, one that’s distinct but hard to define. The leaves look… slightly luminous. Tender. As if, were you crazy enough to nibble on one, it would have a pleasant delicate texture.
The flowers of poison oak are small, inconspicuous, and not usually in bloom, so the leaves are what to look out for. These always come in groups of three, and they have a smooth surface, the veins only showing lightly and the surface not haired or spined. The edges are gently lobed or scalloped – to varying degrees, but they are neither straight nor serrated (like the edge of a bread knife). This helps you rule out other common plants, like blackberry, that some people confuse for poison oak. Once you get all those features down, really the only thing that looks similar are the leaves of a young true oak tree before it has grown tall.
The Latin name is easy to remember as well (even though I had forgotten it). Toxicodendron diversilobum. Intuitive, right? Toxic leaf with diverse lobes. Thanks John Torrey, Asa Gray, and Edward Greene who did the naming. Torrey produced the Flora of North America in the 1800s, and Gray helped him out. And how do I know they named our toxic friend, a newbie may ask? It says so right on all the official listings of the species. Check the names after the italicized species name on the above link: you’ll see Torr. and A. Gray, who did the original naming, along with Greene, who came along later and made some change – I’m not sure but maybe he is responsible for the “Toxicodendron”, since I seem to remember poison oak was a “Rhus” when I first learned it. Anyway this convention is called an author citation, with the namers being the “taxon authors“.
Filed under Botany basics, Native, Plant of the day, Poisonous
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
Plant of the day: California goldenbanner
When I first saw the low-growing bush with yellow pea flowers, I thought it might be an odd form of the evil broom. But how wrong I was! Instead, it is Thermopsis californica, or California goldenbanner.
The leaves are what first clued me in that it isn’t a broom. Though they grow in threes, like French broom leaves do, they are much larger than any broom leaf — some as much as a few inches long. All are covered with soft grayish hairs that make you want to pet them, like the ears of some young animal.
It’s been a while since I looked at a broom flower up close, but at first glance Themopsis blooms appear very similar. Each flower consists of an upflaring top petal, two lip-like lower petals, and a third, bottom-most petal like the keel on a ship. Come to think of it, the overall structure is roughly similar to yesterday’s plant, though the details are quite different. In the pea (or Fabaceae) family, lower petals clasp in around the top of the keel, as if in embrace or protection. You can see this similarity in broom, true lupine, and falselupine, among others. (When it comes to identifying the pea family, keep in mind that the flaglike upper petal can get very large, as you can see in the showy sweetpea).
(note: I originally identified this plant as T. macrophylla instead of T. californica. Thanks to Doreen, below, for correcting me)
Filed under Native, Plant of the day
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 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 
