Visiting Northern Colorado--Early Spring Wildflowers

Plants seen along the Devil's Backbone Trail, Loveland, Colorado

This year, spring in northern Colorado has been punctuated with cold snaps and snow storms, which have delayed the appearance of spring wildflowers.

Well, that is one way to say it. Another is that the cool temperatures extended the visibility of the early flowers.

Cosmopolitan Weeds--Friends of the Botanical Traveler

Victoria, Australia

Thousands of miles from home, surrounded by plants strange to me, I am delighted to see a plant I know.  Look, a dandelion!

dandelion, Taraxacum officiale

They probably are weeds to the people who live in Australia, just as they are in Colorado, but surrounded by unknown plants, the dandelion looked like an old friend.

Visiting Costa Rica--Very Seasonal Guanacaste Province

Costa Rica has been a destination for ecologists since at least the 1970s, well before it had ecotourism infrastructure--one of its strengths today. The attraction of Costa Rica to professional biologists was having so many different tropical habitats in a small area. Naturally, at 9 degrees north of the Equator, there is tropical rainforest. A line of mountains runs down the center of Costa Rica, so while the rainforest as sea level is always very warm, as you go up there are a whole series of fascinating very wet montane forests.  Cross over the mountains and lowland rainforest is there but it is not quite the same.

lowland rainforest, Costa Rica

Finally Costa Rica has dry tropical forest, a region that is very rainy half the year and rainless the rest of the year.  This a climate extends along the Pacific coast of Central America, ending in Guanacaste Province, in northwestern Costa Rica. Many elements of that community are shared with Mexico and even Arizona.

I had imagined the tropical rainforest but tropical dry forest was quite unexpected.

Plant Story--Lovely Lilacs

Lilac bushes grew in the yards of the houses in which I grew up and I assumed Americans had always had lilacs. After all, Under the Lilacs written in late 19th century New England, was one of Louisa May Alcott’s classical children’s stories. But lilacs are from Eurasia, and the classical lilac-colored lilacs, Syringa vulgaris, are native to eastern Europe. 

The word lilac is derived from a word for blue, though the experts don’t agree quite which language started it. You can read that it comes from Persian and Spanish but those are far from the native range of lilacs so likely not the source. Geographically, lilac is likely from a Balkan language, Albanian for example, but I have found no clear linguistic argument. Since lilac is a color word in English, it has come full circle: the plant was called lilac describing the flower colors and then in other languages, the name of the plant, lilac, became the name of a color. 

Plant Confustions for April 1

There are some plant confusions out there. Here are three, coral tree and kapok, tea and ti, cassia and cinnamon.

Coral tree, ceibo in Spanish, Erythrina crista-galli, is the source of kapok, the cotton-like fluff is produced in the seed pods and used as a mattress filling and similar applications.

Coral tree, Erythrina crust-galli, called ceiba in Spanish

April Fool!  There are two trees with nearly identical Spanish names. Coral tree is ceibo in Spanish, scientifically Erythrina crista-galli, in the pea familiy Fabaceae. They are moderate sized trees several native to Central and South America. Kapok is ceiba in Spanish, with the scientific name Ceiba pentandra in the mallow or hibiscus family Malvaceae. Native to Central and South Ameria they grow into huge trees. Ceibo is the national flower of Argentina and Uruguay, ceiba is the national tree of Guatemala. 

kapok, ceiba, Ceiba pentandra. It has just put on leaves in spring, note the pods up among the branches.