Find Prosartes

Day 254: Now several weeks past its blooming period, the Fairybells are just one more green thing in the green, green sea of our forests. I had found Prosartes hookeri near this spot a month ago and, despite it being a common plant, photographed it and put the images in my files, little expecting to have to refer back to them at a later date. In another corner of the universe (Oregon), Arnie was working on the vascular plant list for the same area. We've been bouncing species and subspecies around for several days via email, hoping to refine the catalog. However, when it came to Prosartes, he had recorded one species during a survey he'd personally conducted, whereas my record showed another one entirely. Was one of us wrong in our identification, or were there in fact two different Fairybells at Tahoma Woods? I could recall having walked past some which I dismissed as "not fully open yet" when they were in bloom; could I have overlooked the second species, whose petals never curl back to expose the stamens? Yes, I thought I could have done, and equally, Arnie admitted that he might have given mine (which I was sure were hookeri) a perfunctory glance or missed them entirely. Thus it became my mission for the day to find a green needle in a vast green haystack. In the end, I located ten specimens in as many acres, and all of them along the trail were Prosartes smithii, i.e., the "other" Fairybells. Just to reassure myself that I hadn't made a mistake with the roadside plants I'd photographed, I also checked them on the way home. Yep, different Fairybells. The census has been amended to include both P. smithii and P. hookeri.