This Site is For ... 

Who Should Find This Identification Guide Helpful ?

• Want to identify the many interesting wildflowers they see growing in wild places in San Diego County, and
• Lack formal botany education, and/or the needed experience, to rely on formal botanist publications, and
• Want to do as well as possible at identifying the Family, Genus, and Species using only visual information.  

The recently published book by James Lightner, San Diego County Native Plants [2nd edition, 2006], is a very helpful field-guide if you are somewhat familiar with the 80+ wildflower families commonly seen in our area (and another 25+ not so commonly seen).  If you don't yet have that familiarity, it becomes very time consuming to search one-by-one through the thumbnail photographs in a book looking for a visual match with a flower you have seen. 

What's needed is a way to order (sort) the pictures into groups small enough to reduce a linear (one-by-one) search to a matter of just a minute or two. In fact that's the same principle we all use routinely when searching for a family name in a telephone book, or for a word in a dictionary.  

• In (professional level) biology, a KEY generally uses either/or descriptive statements to subdivide a large set of species into pairs of subsets which differ from each other according to those descriptions. Each choice (or branch) of such a pair, is then further subdivided into successively smaller pairs until each branch refers to just one species.  Unfortunately, most of the published keys often require knowledge of plant characteristics (e.g. shape of the dried seeds of a plant) that we amateurs usually don't have available.  Moreover, the published keys for California wildflowers can require making 20 to more than 30 decisions to reach a conclusion - and any decision on which you are uncertain raises the probability of failure to reach a satisfactory result.
• A Visual Key takes advantage of the human capability to compare multiple visual objects at once - without having to go through those objects one-by-one to decide whether  some common characteristic applies. That capability to subdivide each branch point into multiple branchlets can reduce the number of decision points to just a few.

This guide is an effort to provide a more useful Visual Key for the San Diego area wildflowers.  Unfortunately, it requires that you be sitting at your computer - and thus is not very useful (yet) as a field guide.

Notes on how this Identification Guide came to be developed; How to contact me; Where to get more information.

-- Ken Bowles

This page last modified on 08 February, 2006  

Except where explicitly noted on this website, all content is

Copyright © 1999 - 2006 by Kenneth L. Bowles, All Rights Reserved.

Rights to publish for non-commercial purposes will normally be granted, if I am cited as the originator. A CD-Rom version of the same materials posted on this website, but with the "large" photos at 925x694 resolution (rather than some still on the website at only 600x450), will be prepared concurrently with the progressive "Slideshow" updates described above.