The Purpose of this web site
This web site's main purpose is to educate Park visitors about the wildflowers of the Cabrillo National Monument. It does this primarily by providing tools to help identify plants, but also provides information about them as well. It contains over 2500 pictures featuring 344 plant species.
What's New
Add four new plants, and a few other small changes.
Accessibility
We have worked hard to make this flower web site friendly to screen readers like VoiceOver and TalkBack. By default, these screen readers announce the invisible titles on a page, and consequently we have made a lot of use of them. If you've turned these off in the settings of your screen reader, you might consider turning them back on. There is more on this on the Accessibility page.
Also, there is a "Change site color" button at the bottom of the Home page. It cycles through four different color schemes starting with the default 'Gray' color:
Gray > High-contrast Dark > High-contrast Light > Green.
Please note: changing the color will set a small, temporary cookie on your device. One consequence of using a cookie to manage this is that pages you've already visited may need to be 'Refreshed' before a new color choice becomes visible.
Geographical Area Covered
The "Floristic Region" covered by this web site can be artificially broken into two distinct jurisdictional regions, the Cabrillo National Monument (C N M), and a larger area including the nearby undeveloped lands of the peninsula, much of which is under restricted access. This larger area is generally referred to as the "Point Loma Ecological Conservation Area" (P L E C A) and is the area actually covered by this site. The reason for including these nearby undeveloped lands is that they are immediately adjacent to the Park Service lands and plants found on one side of the fence are potentially to be found on the other as well.
Close-up Photography
When photographing small flowers, the camera was usually positioned as close to the flower as possible, often resulting in a greatly enlarged view of the flower. For plants with clusters of flowers we usually tried to focus on a single flower while still retaining enough of the cluster to indicate that it exists. Some close-up photography, especially of tiny seeds and such, may contain a measurement grid. Unless otherwise noted we have used a 1mm scale. This is because measurement values are always given in millimeters in technical descriptions of plants.
Included Information
The information provided here is a collection of web pages that display pictures of the "wildflowers" found in the Park and some tools to help you identify them. We should mention that wildflowers do not usually include garden escapees, but rather native plants, naturalized plants, and possibly a few waif plants. In other words, wildflowers are plants persisting and reproducing on their own in the undeveloped areas of the Park.
Much of the content on this flower web site has been copied from the Santa Monica Mountains N R A (S M M) flower web site. The plants from these two close National Parks have been judged in most cases to be similar enough that this should cause minimal confusion. However, while the C N M does shares a large portion of its flora with S M M, it also has a strong Baja California influence. Where there might be differences we usually have noted the possibility that the C N M plants may look somewhat different than their S M M cousins. It is worth noting that there is still a list of about 80 plants seen in the past at C N M that have eluded inclusion here. That said, the main types of information here are:
The main type of page is called a "Plant Details" page and each one features a specific plant. Here is an example of a Plant Detail page. These Plant Detail pages contain all of the pictures we have for a plant and a brief description including the scientific name, the family name, and at least one common name. In addition, we provide the approximate location, habitat, and date that the plant was photographed. In most cases there are quite a few pictures and you will need to scroll down to see them all.
In most cases the main scientific name shown is from the second edition of The Jepson Manual, TJM2. Below the main entry there may also be a scientific name listed from the first edition, TJM1, and in some instances, from the Flora of North America, F N A. In rare cases names may be included from other non-specified sources under the heading "Other scientific names." An asterisk placed after a name denotes a non-native.
At the top of these pages is a pair of links to the previous and next plant as sorted by genera and families. These links emulate the turning of pages in a printed field guide. By the way, the reason plant descriptions are organized by families in many field guides (and here) is that arranging them that way puts plants that look alike near each other, rather than the much more arbitrary grouping that results from an unrelated (although obvious) characteristic like color.
Access to the plants included in this web site is by way of the search function available on the Flower Finder page, or by three different lists of names. The links in these lists lead to the Plant Detail page featuring the listed plant. Each list is sorted alphabetically, but they are sorted differently. They are:
The Family Name and the Scientific Name lists have a set of symbols following some of the entries. There is a small table summarizing these symbols at the bottom of these pages. The symbols identify names that are not current in TJM2 with the dagger symbol , names that have not changed but are now under a different family with the Florin symbol , and plant names updated since the second edition of the Jepson manual with the lozenge symbol Note that the dagger symbol is applied to the Genera and the Families only when those names are completely missing from TJM2 as in Nassella and Asclepiadaceae.
The common names have been pulled from many different sources including printed materials, electronic databases, and common use in Southern California. There are over a thousand common names listed for the 344 plants in the web site, but this listing should not be considered complete even within the limited locale of Southern California.
The main disadvantage of including multiple common names for each plant is the much larger list of names to hunt through to locate a particular plant. To assist with that we have included an index at the top of the page and a number of internal page jump links throughout the page. Look for the less-than < and greater-than > signs to speed navigation within the page. Another assist is to include a small table of lowercase "second" letters after the main letter headings. You can tap these to jump to the second letter of the names.
Another disadvantage of including many common names is more cases where two or more different plants are referred to by the same name. These duplications will appear as multiple outwardly identical entries in the list, but each link will have a different target plant. In cases where there is more than one common name for a plant, we have capitalized the name we chose for the principal entry.
In the interest of saving space and minimizing confusion we have tried to eliminate separate entries for minor spelling variations of the common names (for example, cobweb and cobwebby, or bind weed and bindweed and bind-weed). On the other hand, we have deliberately included spelling variations if there are different common names that make use of a variable word. For example, Artemisia californica has common names "California sagebrush" and "coastal sage brush" listed for it, hinting that different authorities treat the word(s) "sagebrush" differently. In a situation like this you might expect that both "California sage brush" and "coastal sagebrush" could be found as well.
Some of the principal sources we have consulted for common names include Milt McAuley's Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, The Jepson Manual, and the U S D A. In many cases we have used McAuley's common name as the main entry since his excellent field guide is frequently used by local flower enthusiasts.
The main weakness of a name list is that it is really only helpful if you already know (at least approximately) what you are looking for. Most people will use the "Flower Finder" to identify an unknown flower. We have tried hard to make the Finder easy for people to use, but there is still a bit of technical jargon to learn if you want to truly master it. Also, some of the seven plant characteristics listed in the flower finder are not obvious at first glance. This is explained in more detail on a separate page called the Flower Finder Use Notes.
When you use the Finder to create a search you are presented with a "Search Results" page that displays a group of small pictures (thumbnails) for you to choose from. Here is an example of a Search Results page. Tapping a thumbnail opens that Plant Detail page. From a purely technical perspective, the Search Results pages can be very resource hungry and some devices may struggle to display a page with a thousand pictures on it. To minimize the possibility that your device might choose to exit the web site if it runs too low on resources, we have broken results with a large number of hits into segments of about 100 each (well, roughly 100 since for your convenience we always break the segments into whole families.)
The search results are organized by families. This is done here (and in many field guides) because arranging them that way puts plants that look alike near each other rather than the much more arbitrary grouping that results from an unrelated (although obvious) characteristic like color. Similarly, the Finder's search results are sorted even further by including more of their taxonomic rank. For example, the first plants shown are from Class Magnoliopsida, Superorder Lilianae (the monocots), Order Alismatales, and finally Family Alismataceae. Within a taxonomic rank we have generally tried to sort things by flower petal count or flower shape, and fallen back to a simple alphabetical sorting only when there was no other obvious choice. Here is a page that provides an explanation of how we've sorted the plants on this site. This same organization applies to the Detail pages as well.
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