Plant Story--Flowering Shrub of Spring, Amelanchier, Serviceberry, Saskatoon

A shimmer of white in my front yard: the serviceberry is flowering!

You might call it shadbush like my parents did, or saskatoon, as they do in Canada, or juneberry--the name you might see in the supermarket--or more regionally shadblow, sarvis or sarvisberry, sugarplum, wild-plum or chuckley pear.

All of these are names for native Amelanchier species, mainly A. alnifolia, though there are approximately 10 species native to North America (link: USDA plants)

Visiting Baja California—Amazing Plants

island: Gulf of California

We set off for the Whales and Wildness cruise in the Gulf of California with Lindblad/National Geographic (link.)

From the moment I stepped out of the airport at San José del Cabo at the tip of the Baja California peninsula, the landscape was exotic:

From the van, north of San José del Cabo

The peninsula has a variety of climates, dry to extremely dry, hot to warm, some areas receiving summer rain, some with winter rain, all depending on exactly where you are. I saw only a sampling of it.

If you’ve been to the desert around Phoenix, Arizona, you’ve seen something like it. Deserts in this part of North America are very old. Baja California is in the core of this zone, with the most extreme, oldest desert and consequently with some of the strangest plants.

Visiting Portland--Japanese Garden

a red camellia

One of the highlights of Portland, Oregon for the plant enthusiasts is the Portland Japanese Garden (link).

Plant Story--Everybody Loves Narcissus and Daffodils

Daffodils!

The English called them daffodowndillies 400 years ago. The scientific name is Narcissus. Narcissus, daffodils, jonquils and paperwhites and whatever other names you know, they are all closely related.  

They have been cultivated for hundreds of years, leading to diverse varieties and color forms now found all over the world.

Did you know they are poisonous?

Plant Story--Deathcamas

Deathcamas. It is a name to put you off from the start.

Yet it has a beautiful flower!

Zigadenus venenosus meadow deathcamas
Pretty isn't it?

The deathcamases are found all over North America (USDA page) but especially in the west. The species in my photos, Zigadenus venenosus, meadow deathcamas, grows all over western North America (link).

Visiting Portland, Oregon--Gardens in the Rain

Portland: Flowering trees, but note the gray sky.

We went to Portland, Oregon for just a weekend in the middle of March, 2016. Oh! the contrast with northern Colorado. Northern Colorado has had mild early spring weather, but the dominant color is the brown of the plains and the bluegray sky.

Colorado, with a snowstorm coming. 

Nasty Plants 2: Some Pretty Plants Will Poison You

oleander: very beautiful, very poisonous

Some plants repel the animals that would eat them with spines (previous post). But other plants are poisonous. If you can keep animals off with spines, why wait until they bite to marshal a defense?
The answers to that will depend on the plant, of course, but one explanation is that not all the animals that would eat a plant are put off by spines. Spines or thorns long enough to hurt a deer may be totally ignored by a small moth that lands between them and lays eggs that develop into voracious plant-eating caterpillars.

The Society for Economic Botany, focused on the study of useful plants, recently estimated that half of the world's 400,000 plants could be eaten  (link). Which lets me suggest that the other half are not edible, many of them protected by toxins that make nibbling them a really bad idea. The link I just cited above goes on to say many of the plants we eat are actually toxic as well. Cassava, for example, requires treatment to be safe to eat, and potatoes and rhubarb have toxic leaves, so we don't eat their leaves.