I Like to Guess Wild Flowers

Last Updated (Friday, 19 June 2009 15:17) Written by Raymond Nakamura

I love to pick topics and see what worlds they open me up to.

My daughter spotted some orange flowers on a sunny hillside at a nearby park and picked some for Mommy. I'd never noticed this flower before and had no idea what it was. But that's not saying much.

One Person's Weed is Another Person's Wildflower

I was surprised how tricky it is to figure out what the name of a flower is, even with the wonders of the internet. Especially because you native plants and then all the ones brought here on purpose or by accident. The term "natural" makes almost no sense. I tried an identification key, where you answer questions to narrow you down to what you have. But I realized we didn't have any leaves, so I couldn't answer a lot of the questions. I was glad to find a guide for the Pacific Northwest, based on the colour of the flower, notoriously unreliable as that is. But I figured that you don't see many orange flowers and soon spotted one that looked exactly what we had.

It was an Orange Hawkweed or more flamboyantly, Devil's Paintbrush. The scientific name is Hieracium aurantiacum. It came over from Europe. Some sites call it a weed and others, a wildflower. Reminds of the discussions I have with my wife about what should and shouldn't be in our garden.

Blooming Tales

Leaving it in water for a while, the droopy stems perked up. The flowers also opened. I wondered how this happened. Dr. Quentin Cronk at UBC emailed me, "Basically flowers open because all or part of the petals enlarge. This increase in petal size is driven by an increase in cell size, as the cells become engorged with water." A plant chemical called methyl jasmonate might also have something to do with triggering these reactions. WHen the flowers closed up later, I thought maybe they were dying. But the next day, they were open again. They have some kind of cycle, though being indoors with lighting and curtains and all that, I couldn't see how I could draw any conclusions on how this worked. 

Time and Flowers Wait for No One

Apparently, I am not the only great botanist to have thought about this mystery. Linneus, the father of modern classification and uber botanist thought about a flower clock made of flowers that would bloom at different times during the day. But it's hard to do in practise because so many variables affect the actual time of blooming. In evolutionary terms, flowers bloom during the day or night in connection with the pollinators. 

OK, got to go pull some weeds.

How do you distinguish a weed from a wildflower?

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