The botany category includes the posts I write about plants themselves. Since I am passionate about wildflowers, many of my posts celebrate them in some way. It can be individual flowers, like iris, fireweed, goldenrod, and yarrow; families of flowers, like the Asteraceae; a genus of beautiful vampires, the Castilleja. I write about rare plants, sometimes in extreme conditions. There are posts on the magic of photosynthesis, 0n why lichen is saving the world, and why there’s such a wild abundance of plant diversity. For Halloween, I’ve explored why there are so many ghostly white flowers and celebrated slightly ominous orange flowers. I have fun with the idea of spruce family planning, with comparing cactus flowers to filmy lingerie. And there’s a post on the seedheads I love so much. Many of these essays are also about the ecology of the plants and their habitat.
The galleries don’t get categories, but most would fall under botany: wildflowers from Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, and Missouri. There are galleries for grasslands in Colorado and two prairies in Kansas, one a ranch, one a remnant tallgrass prairie. There’s one for white flowers, one for cactus flowers, and one for seedheads. Enjoy!
Looking to answer my title’s question about the Tiburon mariposa lily, I was surprised to learn that rarity in the animal and plant world is quite common. Conservation scientists estimate that 75% of the species on earth are rare. The US Forest Service guesses that a third of the native plants in the U.S. can be […]
What is so rare as a Tiburon mariposa lily? Read More »
This is a story about a difficult and fascinating terrain, a beautiful, adaptable flower, and a maddening claim. Bitterroot is far from rare in the western states of the U.S. and Canada. It’s Montana’s state flower and has bequeathed its name to the Bitterroot River and Valley there. Also to the Bitterroot Mountains and the Bitterroot
Living on the ledge: ingenious bitterroot Read More »
During my time in Alaska, while I was enjoying the ubiquitous glories of the vast stands of fireweed, I noticed something unusual. Almost always, among the blazing fireweed were a few stems of yarrow. A white, sometimes pale pink flower, shaped like a flattened umbrella, with stalks of feathery leaves. Except for some pink ones,
Yarrow: a quiet goddess subdues half a planet Read More »
The farther I went north in the summer of 2015, the more I found a world full of lichen. It’s everywhere in Alaska, and a dominant species in the arctic tundra. But it’s everywhere else, too, covering 8% of the world’s surface. Lichen holds the desert in place, fills the forests, hangs off branches in cool,
It takes a village: the community of lichen Read More »
One of the first things we noticed when we drove into Alaska in July was that vast stands of spruce — and Alaska is full of vast stands of spruce — were dark brown at the top. Seeing them from a distance, as we drove through a valley, we wondered if they were suffering from
Spruce family planning Read More »
Some years ago I took a photography workshop at the New York Botanical Garden. At the end of a day spent shooting the vast array of flowers in the perennial gardens, Allen Rokach, our teacher, told us to come back next morning with two favorites to share. Everyone else brought in pictures of flowers at their
This post about cactus flowers has been expanded and updated and can now be found HERE.