Archive for May, 2008
I’ve been working up a list of plants that I didn’t find in bloom for Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest, or that we didn’t plan to include for one reason or another. One of those plants is a small shrubby tree, Pacific crabapple. Phyllis and I left it out of the book because we mostly excluded trees. I’d never made an effort to find it until this year. I asked my native plant colleagues for help finding where it grows and several people pointed me to locations. I found plants a week or so ago, but not in bloom.
I also found lots of escaped cultivated apple trees blooming in the woods and near wet areas where the native crabapple grows. While some of the escaped apple trees are quite big, it’s easy to confuse them with the native. The flowers look a lot alike, especially when you find an apple with white instead of pink blossoms. You have to look close to see the difference: 3 pistals in the native crabapple and 5 pistals in the domestic apple blossoms.
This is a blossom of the Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca, which has 5 white petals, about 20 stamens, and 3 pistals. Sometimes the leaves on the crabapple have a small lobe on one or both sides, but not always.
I found this specimen just starting to bloom in the Connelly Creek Nature Area on Bellingham’s south side. More photos are on Pacific Northwest Wildflowers under May 14, 2008.
This blossom is on an escaped cultivated apple, Malus pumila, which has 5 pinkish petals, about 20 stamens, and 5 pistals. It’s difficult to count pistals in a photo, even when viewed at higher resolution than is possible on the web. It can be challenging even in the field. Very good close-up eyesight or a hand lens is essential. I found it helpful to pull the stamens off a blossom so I could clearly see the pistals.
You can see more photos of the cultivated apples that initially fooled me, as well as some other plants in bloom around Bellingham on May 6 at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers.
Sometimes distinguishing what’s native and what’s not is even more difficult. For example, Prunella vulgaris or self-heal, is both native and introduced and it’s the same species, not even differentiated by subspecies or variety. The differences are subtle and for the most part when it’s the same species I don’t get too carried away trying to tell them apart.
May 15 2008 | Native Plants and Photography | 2 Comments »
Websites need redesign and updating periodically to keep them fresh. It’s a good time to improve functionality, too. In my case, I’ve been posting large groups of wildflower photos to Turner Photographics since I started work on the book, Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. They were organized by year and then by season. Not the easiest way to find anything. Time for a redesign. Time also to split out the wildflowers into their own site.
After several weeks of work by my talented son, Ian, the new Pacific Northwest Wildflowers went live in early May. It’s user friendly, easy to update, and driven by a powerful database. The old functionality of browsing groups of photos based on where and when they were taken is still available, but better organized. New is the addition of all the text and distribution maps for the 1220 plants in the print edition of Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. You can browse these entries by plant family, genus, flower color, and flower type, essentially the same way the book is organized.
The powerful feature of the site is its search capabilities. Every page has a ‘Quick Search’ box so you can look for particular plants by Latin or common name or by photo location. Partial words are accepted, i.e. ‘trill’ will find trilliums. There’s also an ‘Advanced Search’ page where you can specify several key search parameters, such as finding all the yellow flowers in the aster family that grow in Crater Lake National Park.
Once you’ve found what you’re looking for you can build your own selection of favorite photos using the lightbox. Just click the little green plus symbol next to a photo to add it to the working lightbox. Click ‘Lightbox’ on the menu to see the contents and from there you can save your selection. When you save you get a URL you can e-mail to a friend or colleague that can be pasted directly in a browser window to quickly display the contents of your lightbox. It’s pretty slick, and doesn’t require logging into the site to use.
For the technically inclined, Ian built the site using PHP, mySQL, and Smarty templates. We’ll put much of the same design and functionality to work rebuilding Turner Photographics in the coming weeks.
May 14 2008 | Native Plants and Photography and Technology | No Comments »
Distributed electric power production has a number of advantages over the current big power plant and long lines model. Solar power, mounted on rooftops everywhere, can be a significant contributor to living more lightly on our planet. The downside is that the upfront cost is expensive.
But once a solar electric system is installed it just sits there and quietly turns sunlight into electricity. The photo shows a portion of the array we put on our roof earlier this month and got final approval to turn on yesterday. It’s a grid-tie system, which means that we have no batteries to maintain and that when our panels generate more power than we are using we sell the excess to our electric utility. When it’s dark or our load is high, we buy power back. Net metering results in us selling at the same price we buy.
We first considered installing solar panels back in 2003 but choked on the price and upgraded our inefficient gas furnace instead. The price hasn’t really come down that much in the last five years, but there are more choices on the market, more qualified installers, and it just seemed like the right time to jump in. Like computers and other things silicon, I think the price will come down further as manufacturing capacity goes up. It’s hard to predict the “sweet spot” in the curve, so we went ahead and helped stimulate the market.
I did a fair amount of research into the hardware and got estimates from five installation firms before we committed to our system. We ended up with 24 Sanyo HIP-190BA3 panels and a SMA Sunny Boy 5000US inverter, installed by Fire Mountain Solar from Mount Vernon, Washington. Links and photos of the installation are at Solar Electric in the Nature & Environment section of my website. [edit 1/6/2011: website reorganized and photos taken down]
The final step in activating the system was an inspection by our utility, Puget Sound Energy, and installation of a pair of new meters. The PSE guy came by Monday morning on about 10 minutes notice. He approved the electrical work, swapped out our old meter for one that accommodates net metering and put in the new solar production meter. Then we turned the system on and immediately started selling power.
We expect to sell power any time the sun is shining and then buy some back when it’s heavily cloudy or dark. Overall our system should produce about 75% of our annual electric load. That includes all the computer power and file servers required for a digital photography business and our resident web programmer and computer guru.
It doesn’t have to be super bright to generate power. In photographic terms, an incident meter reading under this morning’s dark and overcast sky of 1/125 at f/4, ISO 100 corresponds to 125 watts at 120 volts output from our system. My trusty old Gossen Luna-Pro says that translates to about 5500 lux or 500 foot-candles of light hitting our roof. In full direct sun the output should be about 4,000 watts.
May 13 2008 | Technology | 2 Comments »
Back in 2003 and 2004 I spent the entire growing season searching for wildflowers to include in Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. By the time the season ended, there were about 40 plants that Phyllis and I thought ought to be included in the book that I was never in the right place at the right time to find. Now that some time has passed, I’ve decided to try to find and photograph all those I missed, as well as the handful that I messed up the ID.
The first really showy plant I’ve found this spring is the Black Lily, Fritillaria camschatcensis, also known as Kamchatka fritillary. It’s widespread in British Columbia, but on the state sensitive list in Washington where it is found in only a few places. I connected with someone who knows where it grows near the mouth of the Fraser River at the edge of Richmond, BC and made a trip to see and photograph it this week. See more photos on the Finn Slough page of Pacific Northwest Wildflowers, my newest website.
Not nearly as much fun, but also missing from the first go-round, is one that turned out to be a common weed in my front lawn. I don’t know how I missed Cerastium fontanum ssp. vulgare, large mouse ear chickweed. I photographed it in the parking strip along Cornwall Avenue just down the street from our house during 5 o’clock traffic while construction was going on in the street. I shot more weeds that afternoon. Those photos are at Bellingham Weeds on the Pacific Northwest Wildflowers site.
I have about 40 plants on my list. One that we decided not to include in the book (because it is a tree) is Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca. I put out the word and several people told me where to find it locally. Some of the plants turned out to be escaped cultivated apples (they have 5 pistals) instead of native crabapples (with 3 pistals). The cultivated apples are in bloom now, but the crabapples are still in bud. I’ve found several specimens, and tore open a bud this afternoon to confirm the pistal count. At least I haven’t missed the bloom, and I’ve enjoyed getting out and looking for plants.
One of the places I looked for the crabapple was in the Connelly Creek Nature Area on Bellingham’s south side. It’s a mixed woodland and wetland area, with a lot of non-natives as well as native species.
May 09 2008 | Native Plants and Photography and Weeds | No Comments »
