![]() This invaluable guide provides access by means of photos and descriptions to over 1,100 of the approximately 1,500 species of vascular plants found in the Gila Wilderness and vicinity. Russ Kleinman, Associate Botanist, Zimmerman Herbarium at Western New Mexico University, Department of Natural Sciences. This guide is the comprehensive on-line guide: Vascular Plants of the Gila Wilderness by Dr. Consulting the several books and general field guides on hand regarding common wild flowers of the Southwest (guides that had proved so helpful in the past) proved to be essentially futile, and did nothing more than confirm that, yes, these new flowers were, evidently, not so common! Fortunately, however, and as referenced in previous writings on this blog, there is an excellent guide available to help aspiring botanists who are interested in the plants of Southwest New Mexico. And after 17 years of traipsing the trails over these Casita lands, it was more than a little disconcerting to feel like a stranger in a foreign land.īOTANICAL NOMENCLATURE – A TAXING EXPERIENCEįor the dilettante, botanical taxonomy can be a rather taxing experience … and so it was for the identification of all of these new flowers. During these three weeks it seemed that almost every day a bright, new face was discovered flowering in exuberant glory along the trails, challenging one’s attention with a soft whispering of “betcha you don’t know who I am”!Īnd, for this botany-challenged geologist-cum-naturalist, more often than not they were right! Because, for many of them, one could not remember ever seeing them before, let alone knowing their name. ![]() However, this was not the case! The flowering continued, steadily at first, and reaching a crescendo by the third week in April. Since no rain had been received at the Casitas after the third week of March, it seemed likely that the flowering would soon come to an end as April is traditionally a dry month in Southwest New Mexico. Looking north on Bear Creek in front of Casitas de Gila on March 31, 2015 By the end of March, the drab gray and brown Winter landscape of Bear Creek Canyon and the adjoining uplands was rapidly transitioning into the lime greens of Early Spring. Throughout March, as the days lengthened and the temperatures gradually increased, the profusion of plants steadily increased also, flourishing on the ample moisture retained in the soil from the Winter months. While all of the flowers presented in that blog were flowers that had been seen here at the Casitas before, most of them had not been seen this early in the year or in such great abundance. As discussed in that blog, this uncommon flowering occurred as a result of the 3.99 inches of rain received here between January 1 and the middle of March of this year. The March 2015 Blog focused on the exceptional blooming of the first early Spring flowers to be seen at Casitas de Gila Guesthouses in many years. THE EXCEPTIONAL 2015 BLOOMING OF SPRING FLOWERS CONTINUES Nature’s April Flower Garden: Scarlet Globemallow and Desert Dandelion nestled in a field of Five-petaled Blue Mystery Flowers Climate data used in creation of plant range maps is from PRISM Climate Group, Oregon State University, using 30 year (1981-2010) annual "normals" at an 800 meter spatial resolution.FOLLOWING AN EXCEPTIONALLY MOIST LATE WINTER AND MARCH,ĪN AMAZING EXTRAVAGANCE OF RARELY-SEEN WILD FLOWERS EMERGESĪT CASITAS DE GILA GUESTHOUSES IN SOUTHWEST NEW MEXICO Other general sources of information include Calflora, CNPS Manual of Vegetation Online, Jepson Flora Project, Las Pilitas, Theodore Payne, Tree of Life, The Xerces Society, and information provided by CNPS volunteer editors, with special thanks to Don Rideout. Sources of plant photos include CalPhotos, Wikimedia Commons, and independent plant photographers who have agreed to share their images with Calscape. Propogation from seed information provided by the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden from "Seed Propagation of Native California Plants" by Dara E. Plant observation data provided by the participants of the California Consortia of Herbaria, Sunset information provided by Jepson Flora Project. ![]() All text shown in the "About" section of these pages is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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