It seems as if every time Ed and I go out on a plant walk we come across new species – not new to the world, just to us. This is partly because we are hiking at lower elevations than we normally do, and so are seeing plants that we had never seen in bloom before. Lately I have added eight new plants. Here are a few. Some of them fall into the “Invisible flower” category. Others are just beautiful flowers that have escaped our attention.
One is a prickly pear – which is not only one of the most abundant cactuses in Southeastern Arizona, but may be found in many other places in the world. The one we know best has pure yellow blooms – Engelman’s prickly pear (Opuntia engelmannii). On a recent walk we came across a different prickly pear with red markings in the petals. I had never noticed this before, but had read about its existence. It turned out to be Brownspine prickly pear (Opuntia phaecantha) .
Another plant had us puzzled . It was growing near a stream in Catalina State Park. The leaves are quite beautiful and distinctive. The little white flowers almost qualify as “invisible”, not because they are so small, but because they are so easily overlooked. My hiking companion recognized the fruit as typical of the geranium, or stork’s bill genus. A little research indicated that it was the Carolina geranium.(Geranium carolinium)
On our mountain walks we often come across Mountain parsley, (Pseudocymopterus montanus). Since “pseudo” means “false” we have sometimes wondered what the real Cymopterus looks like. Iris took us on a walk and we came across the plant. It had a cluster of deep purple flower buds. None of them were opened, and it was left to our imagination to see if we could picture what it would look like when it was in full flower. Whatever we might have thought, we were way off. Ed and I revisited the plant this week, and the opened flower looked nothing like anything we expected, as you can see from these pictures. I was not able to discern the flower parts. This looks somewhat like the fruits of the Hopseed bush (Dodonea viscosa).
The pictures above show the Cymopterus multinervatus with flower buds, the second one with buds and flowers, then a close-up of the flowers. The last picture is the Hopseed bush fruits.
We are sure that more plants are waiting for us to discover and enjoy.