Old Photos and Lookin’ Ahead

Time and time again throughout the spring, my wife and I saw what nature could do with a bit of winter moisture and some California landscape...

... just kidding. I'm finished waxing rhapsodic over the wonders of California's wildflowers in 2003. It's time to move on, look ahead to 2004 ... oh ... and have a look at a couple or three old photos I recently came across.

The old photos came about as a result of my latest outburst of downsizing; my wife and I moved from southern California to Boulder, CO in late Sept. of last year, and we've been haulin' around boxes of photos that I simply do not need. All the good stuff's in a collection of binders so I went through all these boxes of photos, taking out all the negatives and sorting through the photos, setting aside a few interesting, or meaningful ones. And a few of these few deserve a closer look; a yellow monkeyflower from a couple years back; a white lupine-like thing which clearly isn't a lupine, from back in Indiana; a velvety purple larkspur from North Carolina, before the gang of larkspurs I saw this past year (yes, in California.)

The monkeyflower, which was photo-ed in July of 2001 up around Truckee, CA., is probably Musk Monkeyflower (Mimulus moschatus,) though I am not entirely certain. There are several yellow-blossomed monkeyflowers, which I find easy to confuse. This one is a creeper, grows up to 12" in length, and prefers a wet habitat. I ran into a lot of it last spring up in the southern Sierra Nevada Mts., along a stream.

The larkspur, photo-ed along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina during the spring of 2001, is probably Spring, or Dwarf Larkspur (Delphinium tricorne.) It loves the woods, and grows in the mountains of the southeastern U.S. as well as up to Pennsylvania and across to Minnesota. And ya know, it was also one of the many spring bloomers along the fabled and now slightly apocryphal Hogback Rd., near my home in rural Ohio.

The white-flowering lupine look alike, it turns out, is White Wild Indigo (Baptisia alba var. macrophylla). It is a tallgrass prairie plant, and can be found in wet or dry prairies. It is a deep-rooted son-of-a-gun, and survives long after its neighbors have succumbed to grazing or clearing.

As far as I know, which is sometimes no further than the end of the block, it does not grow in Ohio's prairie remnants. The species I photo-ed was in one of N.W. Indiana's prairie remnants.

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