Day 260: By and large, I'm not much impressed by Saxifrages. Okay, some of them put on a fairly good floral display at the tops of thready stems, but unless you look past the flowers and start trying to sort them out by foliage, they pretty much look the same and usually elicit "Oh, yeah, that's another Saxifrage" from me as I walk by without a second glance. That changed while Joe and I were standing in Sourdough Gap. I was off nosing around in lichens until he said, "Take a look at this one. It has spots, lots of them." I dutifully climbed down off the rock and had a peek. "Oh!" says I, "I gotta get a picture of that!" Thus Spotted Saxifrage (Saxifraga austromontana) moved into the mental niche I reserve for "noteworthy plants."
It's easy to become complacent when you've been looking at little white flowers all day. After stopping to look at five clusters of exactly the same thing, you start to shelve them all under "LWF" (refer to the previous sentence) and you start to ignore them. Likewise DYDs and DPDs (Damn Yellow Daisies and their purple counterparts). The mind goes into "nothing to see here, just keep moving" mode, and if there was something exceptional, you'll probably walk past it without so much as a nod. In fact, I'd walked by S. austromontana, dismissing it as "just another bloody Saxifrage." Thanks to Joe's attentive eye, I got to add a new plant to my botanical Life List, and as far as the plant is concerned, it now has appropriate status as my favourite Sax. I mean, what's not to like about polka-dots?
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