Inside-Out Flower, Vancouveria Hexandra

Day 239: This photo represents a struggle on several levels, not the least of which was the difficulty of capturing a tiny flower in bad light with a breeze blowing it around. It has taken several days of attempts to reach this point and now I can put the project to bed.

You see, field guides generally focus on identifications to be made in the flowering phase of a plant, and very few of them give you a size measurement. From this image, you could suppose that Inside-Out Flower was approximately as large as Bittersweet or even Jeffrey's Shooting Star. You would be quite wrong. These blossoms are tiny, each approximately 3/8" (1 cm.) in length and only 1/4" (5 mm.) wide. Therein lay my first obstacle in identifying the plant. I failed to notice the flowers during their short period of bloom despite the fact that they grow lavishly beneath the big Douglas fir in my front yard. The second hurdle was that none of my numerous field guides clearly showed the distinctive leaves which for most of the season are all anyone can see of the plant. Time and again, I paged through the guides hoping to notice something I'd previously overlooked, but all to no avail.

About ten days ago, I spotted the flowers. A bell went off in my head. I knew I'd seen them pictured in more than one guide. I dragged out Turner's "Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest" which is organized first by color and then by number of petals, and quickly found my mystery plant in its pages, a side view which did not show the leaf. Cross-checking in Pojar and MacKinnon (my second favorite reference), I found a close-up of the blossom without a hint of the leaf in the photograph. No wonder this little thing has plagued me for so many years!