New Flower Mix

While working the garden, I found a red rose tangled among white and blue Canterbury Bells. I thought it my patriotic duty to take and publish its photo. Having done that, I decide to label a few additonal flower photos:

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Great Flower Year

The string of rain storms has made 2009 a great year for flowers.

I am behind on so many projects that I have not been able to get out and enjoy them. Here are a view photos from the garden:

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Iris in the Rain

I just discovered that there is a program called "Microsoft Picture Manager" on this computer I bought last year. This program has a preset button that will reduce pictures to 800x600. I think I will start making the pictures on my gallery 800x600px. The old picture have a leading edge of 640px. It looks like this new editing program will be less onerous than my old editing program. I can now easily process pictures in groups of one or two. Here are a few garden shots: (My favorite is the bundle of cacti)

Red Butte Canyon

Over Easter, I took a walk up Red Butte Canyon. I was wrong. I thought Red Butte Canyon was completely closed to the public, when only large sections of the canyon are closed to the public. There is a nice bike route on the North side of the canyon. There is also a day hike along the Skyline Trail on the South side of the canyon that wraps around Red Butte Garden.

For many years, Red Butte Canyon was in the domain of Fort Douglas. That might explain why I had in my mind that they area was closed. Prior to the Olympics, Fort Douglas was consumed by the U. The U turned much of the area into a private nature preserve.

There is only a little section of Red Butte Creek that is accessible. You can see big dents in the fence around Red Butte Garden made by wildlife trying desparately to get to the water.

I will have to try the mountain bike ride. He, he, he I could force Coco to run behind me on a mountain bike. Nah...making a dog run behind a bike is just too cruel.


I got some good shots of Arrowleaf Balsamroot on the walk. Some of the Balsamroot is totally covered by hairy stuff. I suspect that the super hairy plants are Hairy (Hookers) Balsamroot. I really not sure if a gallery of pretty flower photos does the world any good. What is needed are resources to help people identify plants. For that matter, taking wildflower photos next to a botanical garden is not a wise idea. You don't know if your subject is a wildflower or something that escaped from the displays.

Curly cup gumweed

This one floored me.

The USU Weed Web (See Letter E) lists Grindelia squarrosa as an invasive weed, but does not include Euphorbia myrsinites. I am simply bowled over by this.

Curlycup gumweed (Grindelia squarrosa) is a native plant that grows well in the dry soils of the mountain west. The plant is used in some medicines, but it really is not good for the kidney. Livestock don't eat it. Since lifestock avoid the plant, the plant displaces desirable feed in overgrazed areas.

Yes, the BLM and other landowners are wise to take measures to cut back curlycup gumweed, but it doesn't belong on a list of invasive weeds of the Mountain West. As the plant is native and is not noxious like poison ivy, there should not be a concerted government action to irradicate it.

Donkey Spurge, on the other hand, is noxious and invasive in every way. The plant was imported from Turkey. The white sap of the plant is both harmful to humans and livestock. It is flourishing in the Wasatch, and appears to be displacing native species. It also appears to be extremely harmful to native animals. (I assume that native animals are adapted to curlycup gumweed.)

The USU Weed Web includes the statement:

Of the 6,741 plant species that are recognized as weeds in the world, 2,063 are currently present in the United States.

This implies that USU is determining that a plant is invasive based on a global list. This is bad science. It seems to me that a plant is not invasive in its native ecosystem. It still might be a weed, but not invasive. Yes, there are ecosystems where gumweed should be considered an invasive weed ... just not in Utah. Conversely, I believe that we should actively work to irradicate Donkey Spurge in Utah. Turkey, the native habitat of donkey spurge, should not irradicate the plant.

Curly cup gumweed is a really cool plant. I think it is an ideal plant for native rock gardens as it blooms later in the year. I actually gathered seeds and planted them last year. Damn, I am now in violation of Utah's invasive species law for planting a native plant.

Invasive Species

If I was a good blogger, I would always have a camera with me.

On my walk yesterday, Coco got into a field of houndstongue and got herself covered from snout to tail with burrs. It would have made a great picture. Instead I spent an hour deburring the dog with no documentation.

Today, I stumbled onto a blog called Invasive Species web log that discusses the plight of invasive species. The blog is from New England. As such it reports primarily on east coast issues; however it is a great example of a what blogs should be.

Wasatch Wildflower Festival

I abandonned Coco for the day and went to the Wasatch Wildflower Festival in the Albion Basin. (Dogs are not allowed in the Cottonwood Canyons).

It is amazing, while the city and desert swelters, the high mountains are still in full bloom.

I was really happy to see the large crowds of people attending the guided wildflower walks. I think that engaging people in the appreciation of wildflowers is among the best ways to encourage conservation. The volunteers at the event had a phenomenal knowledge of the local plant life. The people were friendly, the air was cool and everybody had a good time.

The last day of the festival is 7/30/2006. The wildflowers will still be hanging around for the summer and have a booked engagement in the mountains for 2007.

Mill Creek

Mill Creek Canyon is one of the few places in the Wasatch where you are allowed to take dogs. So, I've added a substantial number of photos of the area. I've concentrated on flower pictures. The Little Water trail is a great place to find such pictures. About every 100 yards, you are in a different zone with new and wonderful species to examine. The Terrace-Elbow Fork Trail is quite interesting in this regards as well. Basically you climb onto a small shoulder in the canyon. This gives you a sampling of a diversity of plant life.

New Family of Plants

While professional taxanomists are renaming all of the families of flowers left and right, I decided that I am entitled to create my own names for plants. So, last night I declared the existence of a new family of plants to be called the Mysteriaceae (pronounced miss-steer-y-a-see-a). The Mysteriaceae is the largest and most diverse family of all plants. It includes flowers of all colors, most grasses and fungii along with an embarassing large number of trees. For that matter, most of the plants I find along the trail belong to this family.

If you are on a hike and someone starts prodding you to indentify a plant, feel free to call it a Mysteriaceae. That will get 'em off your back.

A Mess of Flower Families

My camera takes okay Flower Pictures; Since I now have the disk space and bandwidth, I thought I snap flower photos when I take hikes. Of course, this decision means that my Wildflower gallery has grown out of control. So, I decided to undertake the task of splitting out the wildflower gallery by Family.

That means that I am spending the day dealing with the giant mess of flower names.

I said that plant naming schemes is a mess. The reason for this is that scientists have recently decided to rename all of the plants.

The original systems of classification developed by Linnaeus, et al., was designed to help botanists to name and indentify species. The current thinking is that the nomenclature should follow the phylogenetics of species. Phylogenetics is the evolutionary tree of life.

Personally, my sympathy lies with the Linnaeus thoughts on species identifiction. The nomenclature should first and foremost be designed to aide in the identification and communication of information. The efforts of achieving an ideal like creating a complete and perfect picture of the tree of life could easily be accomplished as a side effort.

The absurd game that botanist play to day leaves the world in an pitiable state where the words used to name plants change on a regular basis.

The Darwinian fed mania to have a Phylogenetic nomenclature has led many people to start renaming species before we really had the technology sufficient for building such a tree of life.

Had we kept the traditional nomenclature that was built with the aim of identification we would have been in an enviable situation where people could still read 5 year botany texts, and have multiple existing abstract models concerning figurations for a tree of life. Instead, we have an absolute mess where people dealing with plants have a difficult time communicating.

One really bizarre result of the Phylogenetics mania is that businesses that deal in plants have stopped using the scientific names for plants and have resorted to using the common names of plants because they find the common names more consistent.

The idea that the names have to perfectly reflect Gaia's creation of the earth is really quite contemptuous when you think of it. The earth is some six billion years old. The nature of geology means that there will be discontinuities in any given fossil record. There are some 350,000 identified species of living plants and many, many more extinct species. The idea that we can easily create a full, complete and perfect tree of life is really quite contemptuous.

Had the glorious scientists who recently undertook the attempt to rename all plants with a Phylogenetic nomenclature had a wick of sense, they would have realized that their efforts were like the early databases that used smart keys as the primary key for rows in a database. A smart key is a key that actually contains information about the data in the row. When you change the key, you inadvertantly break all of the existing relations in the database. For example, let's say I used your birthday as the primary key for your employment record. One day I realize that you were born in 1976, not 1967. My correcting that error would suddenly break the integrity of the database. I would loose track of your employment information.

The problem that occurs with smart keys is happening in botany and contemptuous scientists change names with Darwinian fanaticism. This idea that names must follow Phylogenetics is creating a situation where we are breaking our ability to communicate with eachother. We are breaking our ability to read botany texts from the past, etc..

Building a tree of life is a worthy effort. The effort would actually be easier if we kept the traditional nomenclature based on indentifiable attributes of plants. Such a schema would allow us to create more robust models of the tree of life. Preserving the traditional nomenclature would have preserved the history of errors made in a pure attribute based identification system.

Anyway, here are a few of the pages I've started. Right now each of the galleries only have one or two plants in it, but they should grow as I stick labels on pictures:

Asteracea Family (Aster Family)

Ranunculaceae Family (Buttercup Family)

Scrophulariaceae Family (Figwort Family )

Geraniaceae Family (Geranium Family)

Brassicaceae Family (Mustard Family)

Alliaceae (Onion Family)

Apiaceae Family (Parsley Family)

Penstomen Genus (Penstomen)

Polemoniaceae Family (Phlox Family)

Rosaceae Family (Rose Family)

False Solomon Seal

To the left is an image of a Maianthemum racemosa (False Solomon Seal) that was growing in Neff Canyon. It used to be called a Smilacina racemosa. A Google Search on "Smilacina racemosa" turns up 64,000 hits, a search on "Maianthemum racemosum" returns 51,000.

We are a silly species. People by the tens of thousands are taking images of native flowers and posting them online.

While it would be fun to start on online plant identification program, I doubt that such an effort would contribute anything in such a crowded field.

This would be a good plant to grow in a native (Mountain West) plant garden.

Wild Flowers

My new Nikon D10 digital SLR takes better flower pictures than my old Kodak DC240 autofocus zoom. The main advantage of the digital SLR is the ability to focus! With the autofocus cameras, the quality of an image is just a shot in the dark. I am using a standard 28-90mm lens. If I were super rich, I could get an expense micro lens and really control the image.

The image to the right shows a Spring Beauty that was growing on the Neff Creek Canyon trail. (This image is compressed for internet display. The camera is picking up some good detail.

Of course, now that I have a decent camera, I have fess up to the world that the lack of quality in the images is due to the photographer and not the camera. Maybe some more practice with the camera will make better images. Anyway, I will expand the protophoto - wildflower page. Although I am not a botanist, I will try to include the family and genus of the plants. I don't feel comfortable differientiating species

Solar Powered Flower

The Solar Powered flower night light is a great present. A solar powered flower! What will they think of next?

This site also includes useful solar energy products. I would love to see more solar panels on roofs of houses. I worry about the day when we start covering hundreds of thousands of acres of desert with solar panels and wind farms. Anyway, I just purchased one of these for one of my sibling's birthdays.

Glacier Lily

This photo of a Glacier Lily turned out okay. I also got a decent Buttercup.

In the desparate stab for cash department, I started Mother's Day Gifts page.