Geographical Area Covered
The "
Floristic Region" covered here closely follows that defined by
A Naturalist's Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California (abbreviated here as
ANF.) and includes both the Santa Monica Mountains and the Simi Hills. Roughly, this is the area extending from the Oxnard plane in the west to Griffith Park in the east, and the ocean in the south to the Simi Hills in the north. This area, excluding several highly urbanized neighborhoods, encompasses a couple hundred thousand acres. The actual definition of the area covered is slightly larger and follows the region defined by the
digital Vegetation Map created by the Santa Monica Mountains NRA as part of the Park Service's Inventory and Monitoring program.
Information Included
The information provided by here is a collection of web pages that describe the "wildflowers" found in the Park's floristic region. We would note that wildflowers do not include occasional garden escapees, but rather natives, naturalized, 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. That said, the main types of information here are:
- Plant Details:
The main type of page is called a "Plant Details" page, and each one features a specific plant. These Detail pages contain all of the pictures we have for the 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 almost all 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 name listed from the first edition, TJM1, and in some instances from the Flora of North America, FNA, or ANF (mentioned above.) 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. In most cases there are quite a few pictures and you will need to scroll down to see them all. 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. Finally, most Detail pages have a link to the plant description provided by ANF.
- Table of Contents:
Access to the plants included in this application is by way of the search function available in the Flower Finder, or by three different lists of names we are calling Tables of Contents (TOC). There are three of these TOC and they are all available on the home page and the toolbar. Each is an alphabetical list of the same plants but they are sorted differently. The sorting is by Common Names, Scientific Names, and Family Names. The links in these tables lead to a Detail page featuring the listed plant. The family names and the scientific names have a set of symbols following some of the entries. The symbols identify names that are not current in TJM2 (†), names that have not changed but are now under a different family (ƒ), plants included here that do not appear in ANF (‡), plants that we wish to photograph and are still hunting for (•), and plant names updated since the second edition of the Jepson manual (◊). There is a small table summarizing this at the bottom of both of these tables of contents as shown here. 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 usage in Southern California. There are over 3500 common names listed, but in no way should this listing 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, < and > , 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. An unavoidable disadvantage of including many common names is more cases where two or more different plants are referred to by the same name. These 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, the USDA, and ANF. 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.
- Flower Finder:
The main weakness of a table of contents 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. This is explained in more detail on the Flower Finder with Notes.
- Search Results:
When you use the Finder to submit 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 Detail page. From a technical perspective, the results pages can be very resource hungry and some devices may struggle to display a page with hundreds of pictures on it. Note that 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. 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, Sub-class Asteridae, Order Asterales, Family Asteraceae, the sub-family grouping of the radiate flower heads, and finally, the Genus Achillea. Within a taxonomic rank we have generally fallen back to a simple alphabetical sorting when there was no other obvious choice.
- ANF Descriptions:
The site includes essentially the entire content of the A Naturalist's Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California (abbreviated here as ANF.) Please note that there may be occasional formatting errors in the ANF content as a result of its conversion to the electronic format used here. The entire list of plants from ANF appears here, even those for which we currently have no pictures. This will be indicated in a Detail page by a gray placeholder thumbnail with the words "Picture Not Available." The content for ANF has its own Table of Contents here. This local flora has been specifically written with the amateur naturalist in mind. Despite that, it is unrivaled in terms of completeness and technical detail. We personally enjoy the insights in the plant notes provided at the end of each description.
- Missing Plants:
There are about 75 plants listed in ANF that we have not been able to find, in most cases because their only known historical locations have been lost to development. It is possible that many of these no longer exist in the region, but they should still be considered candidates for encounters. If you do see any of these plants in or near the Floristic Region of the Santa Monica Mountains, we would be eager to know. Similarly, if you find something in range that we have not listed here we would like to hear about that as well. A link to our contact information is provided at the bottom of this page and generally also on any of the Detail pages containing the 'not available' placeholder. Here is a link to a table that lists these empty Detail pages: Missing Plants. If you include these empty pages there are a total of 1082 plant species in this app.
- A list of additional resources can be found here.
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.
