About This Site

This page last modified on 16 July, 2000

Many wildflowers are quite small, often less than 1/4 inch across, yet quite fascinating when seen in a magnified close-up view. Until the advent of high resolution digital cameras priced for amateurs, close-up photos of these tiny flowers often took a lot of patience (and a lot of expensive equipment). Now, with the Nikon Coolpix 950 camera (recently swapped for a newer 990) I've found it easy to get magnified views of a lot of wildflower species one would usually overlook because of their small size. I've also found magnified views of some of the larger wildflowers are visually interesting because they show the tiny structures the flowers employ to attract the interest of insects and birds to do their cross pollination.

The main point of this website is to help ordinary folks (rather than professional botanists) appreciate the beauty of the wildflowers - especially the small ones not normally noticed. This is an ongoing project - only partially completed at this writing. My priorities have been roughly as follows:

  1. San Diego County (plus nearby Riverside County at the Santa Rosa Plateau established by The Nature Conservancy as a nature reserve). My representative sample has grown to just over 300 species.
  2. Vernal Pool wildflowers that are visually interesting. Many species grow only in the vernal pools of San Diego County, and nowhere else in the world. Yet many are in great danger of extinction because of rapid urban development. And they are unlikely to be saved by the county's "Multiple Species Conservation Plan". For comparison, I've also sampled related species which occur in vernal pools in Northern California.
  3. Exotic local species, such as Calochortus (the Mariposa Lilies), not often seen because they occur in small numbers spread over wide areas. My samples include photos of the very rare Tiburon Mariposa Lily, which grows only at Ring Mountain just north of San Francisco Bay.
  4. Representative sample of wildflowers growing elsewhere in California. I currently have photos of at least another 300 species that do not grow in the San Diego area, but will be backlogged for at least several more months before I can get them properly identified and prepared for presentation.

In general, I show several photos for each species in order to give the viewer a better idea of what the plant looks like in real life. In many cases it is useful to have closeup, intermediate, and whole-plant views. When there have been interesting variations among multiple instances of the same species, or between flowers at distinct stages of their blooming cycle, I have shown more views. For example, the seed pods of some Calochortus species are almost as interesting as the flowers themselves - so I have included samples showing the development of those seed pods. By contrast, most books published to help amateurs identify wildflower species typically include just one flower photo per species. I have found this very frustrating when trying to be accurate in making identifications. CD-Rom provides a lot more room for additional photos, and a few of the published CD-Roms today do include two or three photos per species in some cases. I plant to take advantage of that freedom in CD-Rom versions of my wildflower sets. Alas, space limitations within the practical budget for an individual have limited me on the number of samples per species I can show on my Website.

Condensed notes are displayed with the photos for each species. In most cases, these notes are simply copied from comments that I added to an Excel spreadsheet used to keep track of the many photos while trying to identify the species. In a few cases, I am indebted to Jon Rebman at the San Diego Natural History Museum for identifying plants that I was unable to find in the available references. The notes generally use the following abbreviations when citing those references:

  1. Jepson – The Jepson Manual, James C. Hickman (Editor), Univ Calif Press 1993, ISBN 0-520-08255-9.
  2. Beachamp – A Flora of San Diego County, California, R. Mitchel Beauchamp, Sweetwater River Press, 1986, ISBN 0-931950-00-7
  3. Wfl SMM – Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, Milt McAuley, Canyon Publishing Co., 1996, ISBN 0-942568-27-3
  4. Flwr Plants SMM – Flowering Plants of the Santa Monica Mountains …, Nancy Dale, 1986, ISBN 0-88496-239-3
  5. Munz Flora – A Flora of Southern California, Philip A. Munz, Univ Calif Press, 1974, ISBN 0-520-02146-0
  6. CalFlora – database at http://galaxy.cs.berkeley.edu/calflora/ on the internet. A cooperative effort involving several organizations, and including photos on nearly 9000 flowering plants that grow in California.
  7. SDNHM – San Diego Natural History Museum, generally the Botany Department.
  8. TNC – The Nature Conservancy.

These photos are meant to be viewed either from CD-Rom using a stand-alone personal computer running Windows 95 or 98, or from the Internet World-Wide Web using a browser such as Netscape or Microsoft's Internet Explorer (MSIE). Both versions are provided with a simple Table Of Contents (TOC, an alphabetic list of scientific names), and an Index (alphabetic list of common names, with associated scientific names shown bracketed). Click on an entry in either list to see a set of small "Thumbnail" images for one species, along with the notes on that species. Click on a Thumbnail image to see the "Big" version of the corresponding photo. In addition to the TOC and Index, there is also a ThumbsMap array showing one close-up small image for each species. Click one of those small images in the ThumbsMap to get a result similar to clicking an entry in either the TOC or Index.

The Internet Web version is designed to satisfy two limitations:

  1. The complete set of files must fit within a total of 10 megabytes of storage (to satisfy rules of my Internet Service Provider - AT&T).
  2. The TOC, Index, and Big version photo files must all load reasonably quickly over a dial-up telephone modem connection to the Internet.

As a result, each "Big" version photo is displayed in your browser at either 640x480 or 400x300 resolution, and not all ofthe big version photos are included on my website. In addition, you can only view the TOC list, or the Index list, or the details on a single species in a single browser window at any given time (you will have to jump from page to page to browse thru the set of photos). On the details page for a single species, the thumbnail images that correspond to Big version photos that are included have a colored border (showing that each is linked to another file). If you click over one of the un-bordered thumbnail images, there will be no response.