Sunday, April 29, 2012

A Few Spring Flowers

Besides seeing may favorite Garry oak and the gnarly Douglas firs HERE (as well as few Juniperus maritima), I did note some spring flowers on Turtleback Mountain during my field work on Orcas Island. Identification of flowers is a bit of a stretch for me. In the past I noted the fawn lily as "upside down white flower" and the calypso orchid as "spotty small flower". A couple of years ago I was working on a project with some biologists in northeast Oregon. We spent three days in the field together and I set a goal of learning at least three plant identifications per day. Easy when you have able help at hand, but most of the time I am on my own and my ability to go through plant keys is a bit limited. What follows is my attempt at finding out the official names of a few flowers that I see every spring. I could go with the species name, but that may be a bit too much for this geologist to take in.

Fawn Lily

Fawn lily

Calypso orchid

Blue camas?

And the big leaf maple with green blooms and new green growth 

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