Readers’ wildlife photos

Robert Lang is back with part two of his series on California wildflowers (part 1 is here).  Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Wildflowers 2/2

In the newly expanded San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, there’s a nice hiking route that climbs the ridge of Las Flores Canyon, drops into Millard Canyon, then climbs back up to the Mount Lowe Roadway before heading back down via the ruins at Echo Peak. Early April brought a riot of wildflowers to the route; these pictures and the previous set, taken with my trusty iPhone, were nearly all from that single hike.

Picking up where we left off in the Rose family, the hoary rock-rose (Cistus creticus) is a native and a prolific bloomer; although I shot the photo below at the beginning of April, the bushes I pass on the trails are still going strong at the end of May:

Woodland stars (Lithophragma sp.) have pretty little star-shaped blooms. INaturalist pins down the genus, not the species:

Pacific pea (Lathyrus vestitus) is a wild climbing pea vine. The flowers are pinkish-purplish, but can vary a lot; Wikipedia shows very pink flowers, but these were nearly white, just tinged with pink:

There are several varieties of paintbrushes (Castilleja sp.) in Southern California. I don’t know which one this is:

The California state flower is the California poppy (Eschscholzia californica). Before it was settled and cultivated, most of Altadena, which lies on a broad alluvial slope, was covered in poppy fields, which were said to be visible to ships off the coast of L.A., some 25 miles away. The poppies were mostly cleared for citrus and other agriculture, which were then cleared for suburbs, so the poppy fields are mostly long gone (except for some neighborhood and street names). But the poppies themselves are still to be found in the mountains. They’re usually a bright yellowish-orange, but can vary from yellow…:

…to dark orange…

…to a mix of the two:

Elsewhere on the color wheel, purple nightshade (Solanum xanti), also called chaparral nightshade, lives, true to its name, in the chaparral on mountain slopes:

Another common trailside plant is the southern bush monkeyflower, (Diplacus longiflorus). The flowers are touch-sensitive: touching the center causes it to contract, presumably an indication of “I’ve been pollinated, no need to stop here now”:

Another member of the legume family (recognizable as such for its pea-like flower) is the noxious invasive weed Spanish broom (Spartium junceum), which establishes in disturbed areas like roadsides, and then, because of the vast quantities of seeds that it creates, rapidly spreads. Many invasive weeds are easily uprooted; Spanish broom is not, and once it gets growing, about the only thing one can do is cut it down, repeatedly. (I was astonished to learn from gardenia.net that it was the “Recipient of the Award of Garden Merit of the Royal Horticultural Society.” That website characterizes it as “Filling the summer air with its terrific honey-vanilla scent,” which I would describe as “walking into a New Age candle shop in a cheap mall.”:

Sugar bush (Rhus ovata) is also called sugar sumac, and closely resembles the widespread chaparral shrub laurel sumac (Malosma laurina); both have reddish stems and taco-shaped leaves. But sugar bush’s leaves are a bit wider, and their flower clusters look vaguely like dreadlocks:

Last (alphabetically, not by any other measure) is another vine, the wild cucumber (Marah sp), which is not related in any way to edible cucumber (and in fact its seeds are toxic). Its flowers are small and don’t last very long; the most noticeable aspect of the plant comes later in the season, when its spiny, fist-sized seed pods form. When they mature, they burst open at the ends to scatter their seeds, then drop and turn brown, looking for all the world like minature Alien eggs: