Continuing with my California botanizing adventure with Leonard Foltz and Fred Weisensee of Dancing Oaks Nursery. Earlier in the day, we were at Kangaroo Lake in the Klamath National Forest (here). This post covers the rest of the day on Wednesday, 5/25/2022.
Leonard spotted this western blue iris (Iris missouriensis) along the side of the road. The specific epithet, missouriensis, refers to it being found throughout a large portion of the Missouri River watershed, not to the state of Missouri itself. Obviously, it is native to other parts of the U.S. too.
Just east of Callahan, we found this large, flat gravelly area along the road with lots of Douglas violet (Viola douglasii). It was already hot and sunny by this time, so I was struggling to take good pictures with all of the bright sun overhead. Definitely a contrast to the cold, wet weather we were used to back in the Willamette Valley. I tried using my hat to block the sun, with varying success.
Nearby, were several patches of monkeyflower just beginning to bloom. I didn’t realize how many different species of monkeyflower were native to California. Based on location, I suspect this one may be Jepson’s monkeyflower (Diplacus jepsonii). These are small plants, no more than 4-5 inches across at most.
There were also a few scattered plants of Scott Valley phacelia (Phacelia greenei).
Douglas’ sandwort (Minuartia douglasii).
Leonard also found a few plants of bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva). Sadly, they weren’t in bloom yet, but the flower buds looked pretty cool just sticking up out of the gravel.
Even though the scytheleaf (or sickle leaf) onions hadn’t been blooming up at Kangaroo Lake, they were blooming here.
Driving further up the road, we entered a dry woodland. Along the banks of the road, we stopped to admire a balsamroot. This is either the silky balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sericea) or the wooly balsamroot (Balsamorhiza lanata).
And, right next to it was this whitestem frasera (Frasera albicaulis). I couldn’t get a decent photograph of the entire plant with everything in focus (sorry), but I did manage to get a couple mediocre, but decent closeups of the intricate flowers.
Up ahead, the woods thinned out and we found tons of cat’s ear (Calochortus elegans or C. tolmiei) blooming.
More beautiful balsamroot. Gosh I love this plant. L (my L, not Leonard) thinks it just looks like a weed. But to me, those greyish, silvery dissected leaves make it special.
The unfortunatley named carrot-leaved horkelia (Horkelia daucifolia), horking being the dreaded sound of a house cat puking in the night
Absolutely adorable, if poorly named, scablands fleabane (Erigeron bloomeri). If Armeria maritima and Cotula linearilobia were able to hybridize and have a baby, this might be it.
The rest of the day was spent more or less stopping briefly along the road to snap a few pictures before driving on. Here is a saffron-flowered lupine, Lupinus croceus var. croceus.
Fred found this buckwheat (Eriogonum sp.) just beginning to bloom amongst hundreds of scytheleaf onion.
Further up the road, we found another patch of California pitcher plants. Here you can see the hundreds of transparent windows on the leaves. Leonard found evidence of someone who had scooped out large swaths of it from that area. Sad.
It seems that wherever there’s California pitcher plant, there is also white marsh-marigold (Caltha leptosepala). There were also plenty of shooting stars (Dodecatheon sp.), but I wasn’t able to get a decent photograph of them.
I’ll leave you with this last photo of a greenleaf manzanita (Arctostaphylos patula) in bloom.
Guess what? There is just one more full day of botanizing ahead for me to document, so more pictures to come! I’ll probably break it up into two parts again.