A Wandering Botanist: Remembering Summer Hikes

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Remembering Summer Hikes

Summer is ending, in fact, has ended for many people. Here are photos of the summer past, in the Rocky Mountains:

From meadows with knee-high grasses

The trail led upward

Past wild roses (Rosa, rose family Rosaceae)

and bright senecios (Senecio, sunflower family Asteraceae). There's a butterfly on it, but its wings are closed.

There were handsome lichen-covered rocks, just into the shade beside the trail

and picturesque creeks

Some of the highlights for me were these plants:

Pine drops (Pterospora) is a parasitic plant, never green, in the same plant family as blueberries, Ericaceae. This one is done for the year but I was still delighted to see it.

yampah (Perideridia, plant family Apiaceae, carrot and poison hemlock family), an important plant used by the tribes of the Rockies. If I've seen it in nature before, that was before I had heard of it. Pretty white umbels. Fun name, yampah.

and alum root, Heuchera, Heuchera in the saxifrage family Saxifragaceae, has about 55 species, native only to North American and scattered all over the continent. I am always pleased to see one. They've been extensively domesticated, under the name coral bells.

Impressive vistas

Sometimes there were reminders of tougher times, like this burned stump.

Some flowers clung to gaps in the rocks

or grew from the moss like stars

I spotted a native thistle, probably Parry's thistle, Cirsium parryi (sunflower family Asteraceae). They're not common and people's tendency to destroy them thinking they are European thistles has made them rarer. (Learn to distinguish native and introduced thistles, wherever you live).