When I was a graduate student at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s I was lucky enough to take Systematic Botany from Charles T. Mason, who was a collaborator for volume 4 (three parts) of Rickett’s Wildflowers of the United States: The Southwestern States, published by the New York Botanical Garden through McGraw-Hill in 1970. In addition the area around Tucson had fairly heavy spring rains and flowers were blooming that had not been seen in years! The course was a great pleasure to take and the field work around Tucson to procure the necessary collection of plants was pure heaven. The road to Kitt Peak was bordered with lupine and owl clover and leafless delphinium graced the Tucson Mountains. I learned the proper method of making herbarium specimens and how to identify them using the somewhat inadequate (basically unillustrated) Arizona Flora by Kearney and Peebles. Although laws on plants were not as strict as they are today, I followed ethical standards of not collecting more than I needed and to not collect if the specimen was unique. Still that year we had a plethora of examples.
My office mate for several years at the University of Arizona was Dr. Joseph Bequaert, who was in his eighties at the time. He said that an entomologist must also be a competent botanist and I took that to heart. In addition, my major professor, Dr. Walter B. Miller, who studied land snails (as did Bequaert- he had converted from wasps), had trees as a side interest. I never reached the proficiency of Bequaert, who could seemingly rattle off plant species from almost any locality he had visited, but it has been a very pleasant hobby in Arizona, Florida, New Mexico and now Washington. I could always find something of interest no matter where I was and this included trips through Mexico, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and several additional U. S. states.
In the state in which I grew up, Arizona, the flora was fascinating. It varied from spruce and fir forests along the Mogollon Rim, the San Francisco Peaks and White Mountains, as well as the Sky Islands in the Southeast to the sub-tropical desert, Madrean forest, and shrub-land in the South and Southwest.
In the past I wrote about trees (www.dailykos.com/...), roses (www.dailykos.com/...), cacti (www.dailykos.com/...) and plants in Puerto Rico (www.dailykos.com/...) so I will try to center on species of vascular plants that I have not discussed.
Among the most fascinating of plants are those that actually trap and feed on insects — the sundews, Venus flytrap and pitcher plants. I had to move to Florida before I was able to see these strange plants. There I also found bromeliads, some of which adventitiously digest insects that fall into the tanks of the larger species.
Members of various families are also interesting because of their association with humans, sometimes a bit on the dark side. The Solanaceae include egg plant, tomato, potato and pepper, all important foods. It also contains tobacco, Datura, Brugmansia, deadly nightshade and Atropa, all poisonous plants, some of which have medical uses. The family includes herbs, vines, shrubs and trees. A few years ago some young man in Florida decided to eat the seeds of angel trumpets (Brugmansia), which is a very bad idea. The plant and all its parts contain really nasty alkaloids. He died and his mother went on an understandable crusade to outlaw the plant, apparently unaware that an even more deadly plant, Oleander, was present just about everywhere in the state. Oleander belongs to a different family, the Apocynaceae, which includes some other dangerous plants.
Two of the the largest families are the pea and composite families. The Faberaceae contains a large number of edible species, including peas and beans. But some, like Lupines, are poisonous.
The poppy family (Papaveraceae) also contains some very beautiful plants. A field of Flanders Poppies is a wonderful sight to see and we grew them our garden in New Mexico just for the gorgeous displays they made. Here in the Puget Sound region they seem to be replaced by red Oriental Poppies, but the effect is just as startling. Of course the California Poppies in the form of Mexican Poppies were in grand displays when we had spring rains in New Mexico and colored the lower slopes of the Organ Mountains in orange. Occasionally a white poppy would be found in these masses of flowers.
All of these families are Dicots- that is they usually have two seed leaves when they emerge as seedlings. However the other major group of flowering plants, the Monocots, include a number of interesting families — the orchids, the bromeliads, the lilies and their relatives (the family has been broken up into several families), the Arums, and the grasses (from which comes our most important grains) among others. I have always had a liking for orchids and had several, along with some bromeliads, in my collection in Gainesville, Florida. I later raised Chinese terrestrial Orchids, Bletilla striata, in New Mexico, where they flourished on neglect. I well know that some epiphytic bromeliads is south Florida provided a breeding ground for certain mosquitoes in the genus Wyeomyia as I have been viciously attacked by these pests near Jupiter.
Lilies include among others the celebrated Mariposa Lilies and I was once treated to a whole hillside covered at intervals with these in Catron County, New Mexico, and also found a number blooming near Four Corners, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet.
Asiatic lilies are popular, and the flowers are very pretty but the pollen of lilies is poisonous to cats and could cause kidney failure.
Arums are generally pretty strange and in fact the “flower” is really not the colored single “petal” but are on the central spadix. The “flower” is actually a large bract called a spathe.
Grasses are difficult to identify (I have sat in on a semester course just on this family) and you need at least a hand lens and a technical manual for many, if not most species. However, they are often graceful and we use a number of species as food and as building material. Oats, Rye, Wheat, Barley, and Bamboo (the building material) are all grasses, now called Poaceae.
This is just a sampling of the flowering vascular plants. Other non-flowering species include the ferns, clubmosses and horsetails. All photographs are mine.
Vascular plants and photosynthetic microorganisms are vital to our existence. In addition we are just beginning to understand the importance of fungi in the health of forests. Yet we destroy them all with apparent impunity. I look on vascular plants as interesting subjects of study, but also as very necessary parts of our irreplaceable world. We who live on this planet would be wise not to continue the vast destruction that we are wreaking and do our best to avoid the worst that lies ahead, but then wisdom may be rarer than we think in our conceit. It certainly seem to be rare in Washington, DC at the present time.