Friday Flower Blogging

[ellarien]

Orange wildflower Growing in a dry wash near the Rillito, Tucson, November 2006

I went for a walk by the dry river this afternoon, hoping for a bit of desert broom. What I'd forgotten, until I noticed the mud caked and cracked like crazy paving on the bank of the little tributary wash, was that the river had its once-in-a-decade floods last summer. Then a splash of orange caught my eye, and I scrambled down to investigate. I ended up spending more than an hour wandering back and forth, clambering down banks and slogging through the sandy riverbed to get at evening primroses big white blooms I thought were evening primroses, but now think are something else. I saw several kinds of wildflower I've never seen before, as well as the usual yellow daisies. The big white flowers (sacred datura?) fascinated me with their intricate furling, like miniature umbrellas.








There are more pictures on Flickr, here.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Your first flower looks like a relative of coreopsis, and it looks just quintessentially Sonoran Province (the others all look really Sonoran too, and that's as it should be, isn't it? You're in the Sonoran floristic province? We have a bit of it sticking into the Mohave and Death Valley).

Is the second flower a baby-blue-eyes relative or a nemesia kind of thing? Is the yellow one another coreopsis relative or a zinnia relative?

And last: is the white one a morning glory relative?

[ellarien]

We're Sonoran here, all right.

The orange one I'm not sure of -- I can't find anything quite like it in my book, though it does look a bit like calliopsis, the only coriopsis in my book.

The blue, which isn't really that blue (silly camera), is another mystery; it isn't purple mat or desert bell, as far as I can tell.

The white I think is Sacred Datura, aka jimsonweed -- I was thinking evening primrose, from the way they were acting, but of course those have four petals rather than five. (I didn't touch, and I washed my hands well after I got home -- they were filthy anyway, because I'd been climbing and grabbing the rails.)

The yellow I think is desert marigold, baileya multiradiata.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Shuckins. My first draft went on and on about how it looked like jimson weed except the leaves weren't serrated, but serration isn't a thing that plants have to adhere to or give up membership in the clade. I have to stop second-guessing myself. I've spent the last hour trying to see if the solanaceae and the ipomoeacea are related but all I've gotten is dizzy from the number of families in the flowering plant gateway.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Aha!!

Solanaceae and Convolvulaceae are, in fact, related -- notice I had the family name wrong for the morning glories. Anyway,convolvulaceae are in convolvulales, and solanaceae are in solanales, and they're both in solananae, which makes them somewhat related. What tipped me off is the furled flower.

Lost in all this obsessive categorizing, I failed to ask: is early winter the usual time for flowering? And you get the rain in what, late summer? Because that would mean that the time relationship between rain and flowering is about the same for your place and mine (I mean, a few months: clearly the day length relationship would be the opposite). But I don't think it is in the Mohave and Death Valley.

[ellarien]

Our usual wildflower season is early Spring, February and March mostly; for a really good show, we need rain in October-November, and that only happens once every few years.

This year was unusual; we got almost no rain at all last winter, so very few wildflowers, but the summer monsoon rains were strong and early. There was one weekend when we had several inches in a few days, sometime in July, and the river was right up to its banks, probably over them in places.