Botany Photo of the Day

Updated November 3, 2005 at 4:18pm PDT: The server is back up and running. Right now, I'm not aware of any bugs. If you find something amiss, please let me know. -- Daniel. Please note the following – The garden's web server will be down for maintenance on Thursday, November 3rd from 7:45 AM PDT until completion (anticipated to be early afternoon). BPotD will not be available at this time.

Today, I'm dipping into the archival photographs from the John Davidson lantern slide collection (read more about this collection). Originally taken in black-and-white, this slide has been hand-painted, including all of the roughly five hundred pink flowers of bitter-root, Lewisia rediviva.

I'm guessing on the location (near Cache Creek), but the other slides in sequence are from the area. I was also in the region earlier in the year scouting for a similar profusion of blooms, and although I found some plants, I was at least two weeks too late. Had I found them, though, I likely wouldn't have been able to take a photograph like this; it was a cloudy day, and the flowers only open in the sun.

The epithet rediviva translates to “restored to life”. The story, via Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia by Parish et al., is that the pressed herbarium specimen from a plant collected by Meriwether Lewis in 1806 still showed signs of life months after being dried. When the herbarium specimen was planted (!), the plant grew, duly earning its name.

Botany resource link: The controversial, but interesting, botanist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz – “an overly enthusiastic, but accurate observer driven by a monomaniacal desire to name every object he encountered in nature.”