Bloom Reports from the Anza-Borrego Desert: List of Species in Bloom On Each Trip, With Photographs 2012-2013
Table 5 gives the number of plants observed to be in bloom for each species on each hike, with a maximum value of 99 plants for each species. This maximum value prevents one species from dominating the total plants in bloom, and makes it much easier to keep track of the bloom.
Because the hike locations vary, some species will not be present on every hike, so the lack of an entry for a given hike says nothing about whether that species is blooming elsewhere.
For more information, see Number of Species and Plants in Bloom On Each Trip 2012-2013, and Detailed Germination, Growth and Bloom Reports From Each Hike: 2012-2013.
The Checklist is sorted first by category, with dicots before monocots, and then by family and scientific name. The Family and Scientific Name are from the Jepson Manual. An asterisk before the Common Name indicates a non-native taxon.
See Plant Family Abbreviations to obtain the full family name from the abbreviations used in the table below.
The Checklist has thumbnail photographs for most of the species, all of which were taken in the Borrego Desert, given in the column titled BD Pix. Clicking on the thumbnail photograph gives a larger version roughly 400 pixels wide by 300 pixels high. The thumbnail photographs are unevenly sized below, since they originally were sized as 50 pixels wide, but are gradually being converted to larger versions 80 pixels wide by 60 pixels high.
All the larger versions are also presented in Pictorial Gallery of Species in Bloom, organized by flower color, and with the location and date of each picture (the Gallery hasn't been updated for a while, so a number of these species are now missing there).
All pictures were taken by Tom, with a Sony Point and Shoot T9 camera except the following:
- Mike Crouse contributed the pictures for Camissonia pallida, Crassula connata, Eschscholzia parishii, Fouquieria splendens, Mammillaria dioica, Mirabilis tenuiloba, Penstemon clevelandii var. connatus, Prunus fremontii, and Ribes indecorum, using a Canon Point and Shoot model SD1100IS or SD1200IS.
- Bill Sullivan contributed the pictures for Oenothera elata ssp. hirsutissima and Mimulus cardinalis.
- Jim Roberts contributed the picture of Cucurbita palmata.
This table gives the number of plants in bloom only in the last two months, in order to remove species that are probably no longer blooming.
Some species that have bloomed in the Borrego Desert are not listed here, since we never observed them in bloom. Such species are found only in a few locations, and we either never visited those locations or they bloomed in between our visits to their location.
Of course, species that bloom later in the year, and species that do not have flowers (ferns, etc.) are not present in this list, so it is not the equivalent of a plant checklist for the Borrego Desert.
The Checklist follows the 2012 Jepson Manual Second Edition (JM2) with only a few exceptions.
The Checklist is sorted first by the eight evolutionary categories (clades) used in the 2012 Second Edition Jepson Manual - lycophytes, ferns, etc., to eudicots and monocots - and then by family and scientific name. The clades are labeled in the Checklist. Note that this changes the order of presentation of the taxa from that of the 1993 First Edition.
The family name is abbreviated to the first three characters in order to save space in the table rows.
An asterisk before the Common Name indicates a non-native taxon.
The column labeled Number of Plants in Bloom gives the number of plants observed to be in bloom for each species on each hike, with a maximum value of 99 plants for each species. The next row under that header is the month number, with the last row in the header being the day number.
The scientific name is linked to the latest online Jepson Manual description for each species, which also gives the months in which each species flowers. That link also gives a map of where the species occurs in California; a plot of elevation vs. latitude for California; and a histogram of the voucher collections by month. A few species may not have working links, if their names have been updated more recently (such as Mimulus diffusus, which is still listed under M. palmeri in the online flora), or if they are reserved-judgment taxa which are listed in the entry for another taxon name.
The common name for each species in the checklist is linked to Calphotos to give pictures of most taxa. Note that the link will not always return pictures, since not every species has pictures at Calphotos, and a number of species still have their Calphotos pictures under the Jepson Manual First Edition Names.
