More White Flowers...

White is a popular hue for flowers. It's the thickest part of the Peterson's guides, which are arranged by color. I guess it does a good job of attracting a wide variety of pollinators - beetles, flies, moths. But it's getting tiresome, so I promise some color after these!

Here we have California wild cuccumbers (Marah fabaceous), one of about 5 species in the Pacific State. Coast wild cuccumber (M. oreganus) is almost identical, but the fruits look different. These plants are viney and sprawly, with tendril ringlets galore and pretty little star-shaped flowers. Don't get any ideas about putting the wild cuccumber fruits on your salad. The little round "melons" are golf-ball-sized and covered with spikes. Let the spikes be fair warning, they're disgustingly bitter. Mara, I've learned, is hebrew for bitter. But, on the plus side, the large seeds inside are smooth and pretty. Marah are also known as "manroot" because their tuberous roots reach enormous proportions (up to 100kg!) and have thick limb-like sections that can be imagined into the shape of a human. These plants have numerous medicinal and practical uses employed by native americans - too numerous to get into here. But like most medicinal plants, they can be toxic. Research well before preparing your owl natural remedies!

And this...? Those 4-petaled flowers and long skinny seed pods (siliques) say Brassicaeae (mustard family) to me, and it looks a lot like Cardamine californica, but it looks so different, too, outsdide of the shade of the redwoods. This was in a swampy section near some willows at Spring Ranch. I'm not sure on this one yet. I'll have to go back to have a closer look.

Photos from March 29.

More on Milk Maids

While taking pictures of a Trillium at the edge of the woods at my house,I noticed the multitude of Cardamine californica popping up all over the place. They looked like the normal variety, so I thought I ought to take some pics to demonstrate the difference between these and the ones from my other post. Also, an especially purple Cardamine basal leaf caught my eye and wanted its picture taken (above). The heart shaped basal leaf of the milkmaid plant looks totally different from the cauline leaves, which are usually palmately dissected. They are often various shades of green or purple, or both. Below is the whole plant.

So the question is, dear readers, do the individuals in the photos from my other post belong to a subspecies or variety of Cardamine californica? If I had dear readers, I would ask for their input.

The photos above were taken on March 14 in Little River, Ca.

First of the Forest Flowers

Milk maids (Cardamine californica) are a kind of bittercress, or toothwort - they're in the mustard family. They spring early, and are common in shady woods. Some Cardamine species are garden pests and are hard to control because their prolific dehiscent fruits spew seeds efficiently. Milk maids quickly become so ubiquitous in the early spring you stop noticing them. But notice them, because they're interesting: the variation in flower color and leaf shape is wide - at least in this area where I was photographing. These photos were taken today by a forest road in the Juan Creek watershed north of Fort Bragg. They're all within a 10 meter radius of one another yet all so different. (Perhaps different variations, but I think they're all C. Californica.)

And now for a photography note - a demo of the beauty of depth of field in creating different effects with the same subject. The one of the left is shot at f/5.6 and the other is at f/11 (both at 135 mm). They're hand held and the light was low, so the second shot had to be taken at a higher ISO (from 125 up to 800). Anyway, my point is just that both are lovely images but the depth of field gives each shot its own personality. The shallower DOF photo on the left is pretty, and kind of dramatic, but the one on the right has more detail throughout, calling attention to the whole plant, not just the flowers. I couldn't decide which effect was important now, hence the side by side.

There were other early blooms today: salmonberry, violet, coltsfoot, manzanita, iris. But I'll save those for later....