Botany Photo of the Day

I'll be taking some plant photographs for this time of year in the upcoming week. In the meantime, though, here is another image from a field trip last June to Lac Du Bois Grasslands Provincial Park near Kamloops, British Columbia. I'm fairly certain this image was taken outside of the park border. I'm also fairly certain that everyone takes a photograph of this dead tree as they walk in.

The grasslands of southern interior British Columbia form the largest portion of the 1% or so of the province that is grassland (most of the remainder are small patches near the Peace River area and the Garry oak meadows of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands). Despite containing a disproportionate amount of endangered and threatened species for the province, no provincially endemic vascular plants are found in this region (i.e., plants which are found only in British Columbia and nowhere else in the world). However, there is at least one species that can only be found in British Columbia and neighbouring Washington, Talinum sediforme (Okanagan / Okanogan fameflower depending on which side of the border you reside). There may be more, but I don't know an easy way to gather that information.

I should also explain the three images. The first is digitally processed in the typical steps I take. The black and white used Photoshop's Calculations command with red-red channels blended with soft light at 100%. The last image, however, uses a technique I haven't displayed before on BPotD. If you have ever shot landscapes with film, you'll likely know of Velvia film with its rich, saturated colours – in fact, this is a big part of the stunning colours displayed in the work of many of the photographer's I link to in the resource links. Paul Bleicher has created a Photoshop action that replicates Velvia film digitally so you can process your images as if they were shot with Velvia film; this is what I used for the third image. It certainly makes the original image I processed pale and flat in comparison...

Horticulture / botany resource link: Horticultural Myths from Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott of the Puyallup Research and Extension Center, WSU. Plenty of good information here – thanks to Ron B of the forums and weblog comments for bringing the site to my attention. It should have been linked here a long time ago.