Day 257: "Come and look at this," Joe said while I was zoomed in on a small purple flower near the top of Sourdough Gap. "This is a different violet." I took the few steps which brought me to his side. "Look at the leaf," he continued. With two sets of eyes scanning the slopes, we'd been finding all sorts of interesting plants in the east-side ecology. Neither of us has spent much time on "the other side of the mountains," so even common plants were curiosities.
I responded with an appropriate, "Ooooh, I gotta get pictures of that and GPS it." I knelt down, the better to use a macro filter, flipped the flower over to look for a spur. Spur presence/absence and size and helpful in identifying the Violas, although I suspected the leaf would tell me all I needed to know when I got my hands on my field guides. "Oh!" I said. "The back of the top two petals are purple, Joe!" With that revelation (see inset), I had all the field characteristics I needed to make an ID: Viola purpurea, Mountain Violet. We couldn't have found a better specimen. The Violas (including V. purpurea) often intergrade, creating new plants with characteristics of both parents according to dominant traits. This was as pure purpurea as we could have hoped to find: leaf morphology, colour, "bee guides" on the lower petals, the whole nine yards. As much as I love finding "new" plants and especially the less common ones, I prefer it when they conform to the standard descriptions. Had this been an intergrade, I'd probably still be trying to figure out what it was.
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