Sometimes plants raise many questions when we find them in the field.  Castilleja levisecta, golden paintbrush, is a rare species that is only found in a very small number of places and in some of those there are only a few plants. I visited one of those sites last week to make the photograph above and spent about an hour working with the plants on a windy late afternoon. The location is hazardous and not one I’d recommend visiting as the slope is steep and slippery.  I almost wished for crampons and a belay as I carefully placed my feet to avoid damaging the habitat.

At this particular location golden paintbrush is quite prolific, but only within a small area on the bluff. Go just a short distance north or south and the plant is nowhere to be found. Why does it apparently thrive there and not elsewhere? The slope, which is rather sandy soil, is slowly eroding back away from the beach. How does the paintbrush deal with this natural force? Paintbrushes are hemiparisitic, forming a relationship with a host plant to help them extract nutrients from the soil. But they aren’t super picky about the host, growing with a number of grasses, Artemisia species, and Oregon sunshine. What is their preferred host here? There are both grasses and Oregon sunshine on the slope and I found golden paintbrush among both.  I also found weedy introduced species like Rumex acetosella, sour dock, on the slope.

This area has had human influence a long time, by white settlers and by Native Americans before them. But the bluff is probably infrequently visited.  Work is underway to reestablish golden paintbrush in other locations throughout its former range from seed collected in places like this, propagated in a greenhouse, and then planted out. There’s been some success getting the transplants to grow, but it’s a long slow process.

Photographers often bracket exposures, shooting what the meter says and then a little overexposed and a little underexposed to make sure they get one that is perfect. It’s just as important with digital as with film as digital sensors are prone to blowing out overexposed highlights and shadows can get noisy. But there’s another bracketing technique that I also find useful.

I photographed these Bog Laurel, Kalmia microphylla, blossoms yesterday afternoon at Burns Bog in Delta, British Columbia. I like to separate the main subject from the background, and one of the effective ways to do that is to that is to shoot at a relatively wide aperture to the plane of focus from front to back is shallow. The background goes soft. In the photo above I used f/5 with my 100mm macro lens. I like the soft background, but only the buds and the blossom on the right are truly sharp.

Then I stopped down just over a stop to f/8 and made another exposure. You can see that the background is not as soft in this one, but more of the blossoms are sharp. I used my camera’s depth of field preview before I shot, checking smaller apertures as well. By the time I got to f/11 the background was too busy and I didn’t waste time shooting that one. I still haven’t decided whether I like the softer background or the sharper flowers better. With Photoshop I could combine the two and I think it would still look natural, but that’s a fair amount of work. In any case it’s all about choices, and sometimes it’s easier to shoot several variations and make the discriminating decisions later.

Burns Bog is a unique and disappearing ecosystem in southern British Columbia. It’s being pushed in from all sides by farming, development, and highways. As I was working along the boardwalk through the Delta Nature Preserve, the only part of the bog currently open to the public, my ears were constantly assaulted by the sound of traffic on nearby highway 91 at the south end of the Alex Fraser bridge over the Fraser River. On my visit yesterday the shrub thicket of Labrador Tea and Bog Laurel was just beginning to bloom. I’ll go back in a week or so when there should be more blossoms. See more of yesterday’s photos at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers.

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.