Natural Landscapes
May 2, 2008
Oak Haven Park
The first photograph in today's entry was taken at 6:16pm, on a Thursday a few weeks ago. It was actually taken out of a bit of impatience. Twice in the twenty minutes or so prior to that, I was asked by people walking along the path what I was taking a photograph of. "Just the scene, but I'm waiting for the sun to come out." Finally, a few minutes later, I took the second image at 6:20pm. I do a lot of waiting, it seems, when taking photographs. Wait for the light. Wait for the stillness between breezes. Wait for the clouds.
Anyway, I thought this would be a decent follow-up to yesterday's BPotD. I've tried taking photographs of Garry oak habitats before, but I wasn't happy with the results. This is better than what I've done previously, but I've still some ways to go.
Despite its location (minutes away from the extremely popular Butchart Gardens), Oak Haven Park is, by my estimation, rarely visited except by those who live nearby. At 10.2 hectares (25 acres), it is the "largest intact Garry oak ecosystem left in Central Saanich". That's not very large. In many ways, its obscurity is a good thing -- if even a twentieth of Butchart Garden's visitors toured here, it'd quickly become a degraded ecosystem (or require all trails to be fenced). On the other hand, places need to be known about if they are ultimately going to be cared-for and protected.
The most common plant in flower in the park a few weeks ago was Erythronium oregonum, meaning I was (once again) too early for the show of flowers in the meadows in a good year (something like the photograph on this page linked above).
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 1:48 PM| Comments (11)
April 7, 2008
Shell Creek Road
To start off, a thank you for all of the comments recently (including the birthday wishes!).
I was away in California for the past two weeks, taking photographs around Lancaster (the poppy reserve), Atascadero (colourful fields of flowers), the Arboretum at UC Santa Cruz, Point Lobos and UC Berkeley Botanic Garden. It had been several months since I had a photography trip, due in most part to the work required to complete the John Davidson web site. Now that that is done, though, I'm expecting to make a number of trips for the remainder of this year.
Today's photograph is from the Shell Creek Road area of California, east of Atascadero along Highway 58. On either side of the creek for a few kilometres were fields of baby blue-eyes, goldfields, California poppies, tidy-tips and fiddlenecks. The areas weren't solid masses of colour as I had hoped, but impressive nonetheless.
I used a couple web sites to determine where I'd be visiting: Carol Leigh's Wildflower Hotsheet and, to a lesser extent, Desert USA Wildflowers (the latter is better if you are planning on visiting the desert areas, which I decided I was too late for). My self-appointed task now is to avoid these sites, though, because of the displays I feel I'm missing out on.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 10:20 AM| Comments (4)
January 22, 2008
Saccharum ravennae
Thank you to Douglas Justice for both the write-up today and the photographs!
On a short vacation to India this time last year, one of our stops was Jim Corbett National Park, a fascinating mixed deciduous and evergreen forest and grassland reserve famous for tigers. The emptiness of the chaurs (rolling grasslands) was a beautiful antidote to the noise and chaos of the crowded towns and cities of northern India.
There were plenty of wild animals to be seen—this is standard fare for visitors to the park—but I admit I was more interested in the flora and stunning landscape. Our guides, Gurvinder Singh and Geeta Bhatnagarof (of Joint Adventures), were somewhat disappointed that we didn't see any tigers, but there was plenty of evidence that the big cats were nearby. We could hear them roaring and purring (mating behaviour, evidently). I was so absorbed in plant watching, I hardly noticed. Let's just say I didn't get out of the vehicle to check out the fresh scratch marks on the bark of a Butea monosperma (flame-of-the-forest).
The first image, shot from the relative safety of our four-wheel drive vehicle, shows how easy it is to not see a tiger. Note that this grass, tentatively identified as Saccharum ravennae, has been burned. The area is routinely and systematically torched in the dry season both to discourage the forest from expanding, and shorten the grasses (some of which will grow to 8m or more), thus maintaining good wildlife-viewing opportunities.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 10:25 AM| Comments (6)
January 16, 2008
Kiger Gorge
Kiger Gorge on Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon displays a pattern sometimes seen in gorges and valleys in the Great Basin of North America – a mass of vegetation on one side of the valley, little on the other side. In the case of Kiger Gorge, the U-shaped valley runs north-south (this photograph is taken from the Kiger Outlook, looking north). The east-facing green slope should receive roughly the same amount of sun as the dry, brownish west-facing slope, but (I am guessing) the difference of when the sun shines on each slope accounts for the disparity; the slope with the western exposure will receive direct sunshine from mid-morning to early evening (after the air temperature has risen), whereas the east-facing slope starts to fall into shadow during some of the hottest hours of the day in mid-afternoon. I do have to caution that this is only an educated guess; other factors could be at play, such as microclimates caused by air movement or precipitation.
View a topographic map of Kiger Gorge (click on the map on that page for a larger image) or view the terrain map via Google for some insight into this glacier-carved landscape.
This photograph is from the 2007 Intermountain Expedition. Brent Hine will be sharing a presentation on this trip later this month at UBC Botanical Garden in “Explorations in the Great Basin”.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 9:18 AM| Comments (11)
December 14, 2007
Larrea tridentata
During a March drive into Death Valley National Park on what seemed like an exceptionally dark night, I was able to identify this species as being in the surrounding area from the car without even seeing it. The smell of the plant wafted into the car from the vents, and there was no mistaking it: creosote.
I'll share some close-up photographs of creosote bush plant tomorrow, but this habitat shot illustrates what Wikipedia calls “the peculiar regularity in the spacing of individual plants within a stand”, i.e., instead of forming dense stands, there is always spacing between individuals. There aren't any citations currently associated with the Wikipedia article on Larrea tridentata, but the reason for the spacing seems to be the extremely effective water-absorption abilities of mature plants preventing the establishment and development of seedlings.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 9:01 AM| Comments (11)
October 6, 2007
Skagit Valley Provincial Park
I made my annual trek yesterday to view the autumn colours (particularly Acer circinatum) in Manning Provincial Park and the adjacent Skagit Valley Provincial Park. In my opinion, the colours were average or a bit better along the Highway 3 roadside, so not as spectacular as the previous two years. On the hiking trail I went on, though, the colours were non-existent to below par. Admittedly, the trails don't seem to be as good as the highway roadside for colour, but the trails have the distinct advantage of being away from wind-causing, noisy highway traffic.
After a brief bit of disappointment regarding the maples, I mentally switched gears and started to photograph other things, like this scene from the Skagit River trail. There are two or three spots along the first 6km (3.75 miles) of the trail where the floor of the forest is dominated by the moss shown here, Hylocomium splendens for stretches of 50m (160feet) or so. Invariably, these are areas shaded by coniferous trees and therefore with acidic soils, but that combination of factors is present elsewhere along the trail where the moss isn't found in such quantity. So why only in these brief stretches? I don't know. If forced to make a guess, I would suggest two possible reasons (or a combination thereof): marginally increased local humidity or that this is a successional stage in the re-establishment of plants after a rock and mud slump. The latter strikes me as a good possibility; the ground beneath the thick layer of moss was quite rocky and, after the heavy rains of last year, a new rock and mud slump occurred elsewhere along the trail — approximately 50m wide!
From the Bryophyte Flora of North America entry for Hylocomium splendens, we learn that stair-step moss or stepped feathermoss is “one of the most common and widespread mosses of the circumboreal forest and Arctic tundra, which covers huge areas of Alaska, Canada, northern Europe, and Siberia” and also present in northern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. To view more photographs of Hylocomium splendens, visit the Bryophytes of North America photo gallery or the Northern Ontario Plant Database (the latter has a description of the moss and more resource links.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 7:20 AM| Comments (9)
October 4, 2007
Populus trichocarpa
Black cottonwood has previously been featured on BPotD here: Populus trichocarpa. Two resources to add to those listed there: the Silvics of North America treatment of Populus trichocarpa and GRIN's Populus balsamifera subsp. trichocarpa (a synonym; the previous BPotD touches on the naming issue).
This photograph was taken on the shores of Medicine Lake in Canada's Jasper National Park. “Medicine Lake” should actually be in quotes — it's not a true lake, as it only exists for part of the year. The in-flowing Maligne River backs up in this area for several months of the year due to the volume of glacial meltwater, forming the lake-like body. The water slowly drains via a series of sinkholes, travels through a cave system and then emerges 16km / 10miles downstream in Maligne Canyon. You can estimate the summer high-water mark from the band of vegetation-free shoreline.
Entomology / photography resource link: Via the Zooillogix weblog, mantis photographs by photographer Igor Siwanowicz. If you want to see more of Siwanowicz's work (and trust me, you want to), visit his photo.net gallery: Igor Siwanowicz.
Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 6:54 AM| Comments (5)
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Botany Photo of the Day and all associated images are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Botany Photo of the Day is a project of the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research, located in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada. UBC BGCPR is a department of the Faculty of Land and Food Systems within The University of British Columbia.