Going hiking to take pictures of plants doesn’t seem like writing – unless the goal, farfetched as it might seem, is to complete a county flora. Several things slow down my acquisition of photographs. The most annoying is losing found plants.
My Planned Plant Entries
One of my difficulties with plant identification books, guidebook or serious botany book, is how hard it is to identify a plant. The guidebooks have pictures only of the flower. There is a description a non botanist can puzzle through.
Serious botany books, modern ones anyway, have drawings of some plant aspects. These are done from herbarium sheets where the plants have been pressed flat and dried. Living plants can look very different.
My goal is to have a main flower picture, a secondary one of the plant, small pictures of the back of the flower (often needed for identification), the leaf, the stem and the fruit (seedpod, fruit, seed).
The Challenge of Dent County
Thumbing through the “Flora of Missouri” by George Yatskievych, I used the range maps – notoriously inaccurate – to make a list of possible plants living in Dent County. There were about 2000 of them counting grasses, trees, shrubs, vines and wild flowers.
My main focus for now are the wild flowers including flowering trees and shrubs. Grasses are interesting and very difficult to identify although I do include a few like cattails.
Going Looking For Plants
Mostly I go searching around my home area. It is convenient and has a wide variety of habitats. There are usually very few people except for those going to the river on hot days.
This year I have branched out to some Conservation Areas. ShawneeMac has been a good place for several years. Gelhild and Graham Brown is new this year. Both have plants not growing around my home area.
Losing Found Plants
I found two new plants this year and took most of the pictures on the list. The missing picture was of the seedpods.
Both plants were in accessible places with surroundings I thought were identifiable. Perhaps I should have marked the plants with ribbon, but these aren’t at home.
When I went back a couple of weeks later, I could not find these plants. Other plants had grown up around them. So I now have two more plant entries waiting for that last picture.
Next year I will mark those plants.
