Saxifraga Austromontana, Spotted Saxifrage

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?

Viola Purpurea, Mountain Violet

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.