Notes on FireFollowers Photos

This page last modified on 13 June, 2004 - 

This grouping of photos highlights many of the wildflower species described in the Jepson Manual and/or in Beauchamp's "A Flora of San Diego County California" and/or in Munz' "A Flora of Southern California" as often occurring in "burns" - typically meaning places burned over within the last year.

You may notice that most of the species shown in this FireFollowers grouping can frequently be seen in places that have not been burned over in recent years.  But most shown here benefit in some way from environmental changes brought about by the fires. A majority of the species shown here were photographed this spring in areas burned during the 2003 Cedar and Paradise fires.  Place and date are noted for all of these photos. You will see that some were from the Pines fire of 2002, or the Viejas fire of 2000, or a local fire around Carmel Mountain Reserve in 1999.

In 2004, I've been able to spend enough time photographing in the areas burned during the two 2003 fires to notice several aspects beneficial to photography - if not always to the plants:

• Many of the plants are growing profusely compared with their normal distribution. They are greener, larger, and generally appear healthier than normal.
• Where many of these species normally are found growing amid a confusion of other competing plants, grasses, etc..., this year they often may be found growing virtually alone - allowing more detailed pictures of leaves, inflorescences, plant structure, etc.

The format is the "Slide-Show" format that I'm progressively applying to all wildflower families shown on this website. You can see a series of photos, generally showing the inforescence, leaves, overall plant structure, ... by clicking over the thumbnail image showing a closeup view of the flower.  To see just the full-size view of the image shown in the thumbnail view, click the names link below the thumbnail.  Then click your browser's "BACK" command to return to this page of thumbnail images.

To save website disk space (as well as the hassle needed to maintain duplicate sets of photos) all of the photos shown in this section will eventually be found in the disk directories corresponding to their respective botanic families. To bypass a long time delay before getting this group online, I'm initially placing the photos here in this "FireFollowers" pseudo-directory. Over the next several months, the actual image files will be moved into their respective botanic family directories as I get time to do the work. However the (for Topic) icon seen left of the photo will continue to step to the next species in the current group (i.e. not to the next species within the corresponding botanic family). But if you view the same photos within the botanic family group, the icon will step to the next species within the family. As always, the (for Photo) icon steps to the next photo in the current group.

In keeping with the overall theme of this website, I'm spending a lot more time trying to identify the plants in the recent photos than I am in completing presentation of the many older photos.  For some families, the concept of a photo-based key seems to work fairly well, while for others it's almost useless.  I've learned that the keys in the Jepson Manual and Munz Flora  are actually very helpful for some families, but hardly at all for others where one may need to dissect the seeds, ovary, roots, or other parts of the plants (which are off-limits to non specialist park visitors).  In those cases, the location information in Beauchamp's "Flora" and in the Simpson et. al. "Checklist" greatly reduces the list of potential candidates. I initially thought that the wide extent of the recent wildfires would raise the probability that I would be finding and photographing relatively rare and unusual species in larger numbers than has been true in fact.  But the difficulty in using the Jepson, Munz, and similar keys is increased because such a large percentage of the species listed are either rare and/or unusual, or not known to grow in San Diego County. Adding to the confusion, one can often arrive at the same Botanic Family candidate using the Jepson or Munz family-level keys by following several (or even many) decision paths. 

On a recent CNPS outing to one of the local burn areas, it seemed that some of the participants were able to recognize a surprising diversity of species based on visual characteristics alone - in fact few of the flowers had yet to appear on many of the plants. That reinforces my belief in the utility of a visual key.  It's clear that I need to find logic that will permit reducing the length of the list of photos one needs to scan linearly to make the visual key truly useful.

As always, E-mails to correct my identifications or suggest better ways to order the key will be very much appreciated. (Sorry, but to avoid my getting on additional Junk Mail lists, you'll have to construct my E-mail address as follows by hand: <last name><initial letter of first name><at sign>att<dot>net ).

-- Ken Bowles