Roadside Botanizing 4.06.04 (revised 6.25.16)

baby baby coyote bush. is that you?
gorse glowing yellow all over your sides and ridges from here to there.
wild lilac cemosis charkia (subspecies raciae) only grows in Tomales bluffs, which is why i came to you.
I can see you walking.
the more i know you the more i see you.
morning glory. little has changed except your name, from convolulus in 1993, when you told me some things happened, to calistigia purpurata, your species name.
How clear are you about coming here? as clear as the california sage?
I am here, as the ossoberry. The bear.
You are here as the sticky monkey bush.
I am delighted.
how rare for two people to come together? and like each other? and not drive each other mad? how rare and improbable? rare, but not endangered, like this little fiddlestick you see, absincia lunaris.
i care for you.
don’t touch the poison hemlock, the same that killed socrates. i thought it was a wild carrot, but i know little. it’s from the parsnip family.
there is so much to wonder about, isn’t there?
is that a seniculi? with the red bellflowers. no, it’s a larkspur, delfinium. it’s in the reniculus familiy. phacilia. slightly zygomorphic flowers – it has three leaflets –– no, it has five!
Do we have both thimbleberry and salmonberry here? we do! thimble is "simple."
seetum is succulent.
there is so much i want to share.
Let me show you my favorite, with the shiny patterns like shamanic visions, the milk thistle, silybum marianum, the botanical name, the subspecies, named after the virgin mary.
and there, there, there, my friend is a lovely native grass up there I hope you can see!
and come here and see! -- we’ve got a orobanche uniflora over here! with one little floppy ruby-purple petal. a cute little parisitic broomrape. hiding in the succulent.
and there’s three or four -- at least five lupine species right here!
tell me what you see, what you love,
rock gardens, your throat warbled -- the succulent, "live forever" it is called, dudlia pheronsica.
there is so much to do together.
like making soap as the indians did. straw lillies, chromalam. soap root.
You and me, we shall prevail, in spite of this awful fennel that chokes things up and shades us out.

I am your sheep sorrel. spelled s-o-r-r-e-l. baaaaaah!