Day 182: If I had not been down on my knees in the wet moss looking at something beside it, I would never have noticed that this plant was flowering. From a distance of a foot or less, the star-shaped blossoms looked like nothing more than fuzzy-wuzzy tufts. At something under 5mm from tip to tip, the translucent petals could easily have escaped my notice, and the foliage was grasslike, not something which commands the attention readily. But there I was, my trouser knees soaking up moisture, and...hang on a mo'. Is that a flower? The light was poor and the pictures I took weren't good, but when I got home and started trying to identify the plant, I quickly realized that I was out of my depth. I suspected it of being a sedge of some sort (a complicated group of plants whose devotees call themselves "beak-heads" for the necessity of examining the achenes in order to confirm identification), so I shipped the best of the images off to my two favourite botanists with a call for help. As it turned out, the plant was not a sedge but a rush, Luzula multiflora (Common Woodrush), but despite the "common" in the name, there had been exactly two of them and no more at this particular location. I knew I needed to get better pictures, so made a return trip early the following morning, so early in fact that the flowers had not yet opened. I killed an hour searching for more of them in the area, but they were still not fully open when I looked again. I left, took care of some business in town, then returned and hiked up the hill again. This time, one flower was open on each of two heads. I took almost a hundred photos in the hopes that at least one would be good enough to add to the WTU Herbarium gallery, and wound up with nine worth keeping for personal reference, with three views going to WTU.
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