Whiting Ranch Wilderness 2

Posted on May 13, 2003 in Biomes Neighborhood Photos

Wildflower identification. You see this by the side of the trail:

It’s standing in a thicket on a sandstone slope, crowded in with others like it. You’re sure that from one of the wildflower handbooks you’re lugging in your shoulder bag, you should be able to learn it’s name.

You flip through several pages, compare plates and photographs. You examine the leaves, the shape of the petals, the stamen. And you cannot find a proper match. This flower seems to have no peer among the ones depicted.

A passerby tells you that it’s “blue-eyed grass”. But you know it’s not. Farther up the hill, you’ve seen a patch of blue-eyed grass and this isn’t anything like it. The petals, the stamen, the leaves — none of these fit the description. But the passing expert is insistant. “It’s blue-eyed grass”. And so you come to know that you’ve put your trust in one of those people who sees only a color and a size, someone who saw something blue by the trailside once and was told that it was “blue-eyed grass”. And so every bluish, purplish flower of thumbnail size is blue-eyed grass to him. It doesn’t matter if it is spring when the wildflowers burst out like a schizophrenic episode or late summer when the grasses dry to tannish cinders. He’s nothing but a walker, out for his exercise, interested only in the feel of the blood pumping in his sinews.

You take a photograph — you don’t pick it because this might be the only place where it exists and your selfish act could mean one less seed cast out to wait for the right conditions. You go home and study the picture for hours.

Oh what are you, violet mystery flower? Your petals, the tight white star at your heart — they are all clues. But I know you not and cannot find anyone who recognizes you. Did you escape from a garden or is this your only native field?

This is not “blue-eyed grass” either.
Click on the picture to find out its name.