The Purpose of this web site
This web site's main purpose is to educate Park visitors about the wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. It does this primarily by providing tools to help identify plants, but also provides information about them as well. It contains over 7500 pictures featuring over a thousand plant species. It also contains most of the text of the book A Naturalist's Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California published by Barry A. Prigge and Arthur C. Gibson.
What's New
The July 2024 update is a minor update. Changes include:
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 here closely follows that defined by the book A Naturalist's Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California (abbreviated here as A N F .) This region includes both the Santa Monica Mountains and the Simi Hills. Roughly, this is the area extending from the Oxnard plain in the west to Griffith Park in the east, and the ocean in the south through 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 here is slightly larger, and follows the region defined by the Park's Digital Vegetation Map created by the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area as part of the National Park Service's Inventory and Monitoring program.
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. 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, from A Naturalist's Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California, A N F, 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. Finally, most Plant Detail pages have a link to the plant description provided by A N F.
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 , plants included here that do not appear in A N F with the double-dagger symbol , plants that we wish to photograph and are still hunting for with the bullet 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 3500 common names listed for the one thousand 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, the U S D A, and A N F. 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.
If you cannot remember the exact name of a plant when using a name list, you may find the version of that page designed for applying a text search useful. For example, if you cannot remember if the rose you are looking for is under "California Rose" or "Wild Rose" you can search on "rose" to see what the choices are. Here is the page that provides access to the five large pages that are most useful for applying a text search.
Unfortunately, the need to have all the names on one page (so your browser's search function can hunt through all of it at once) means these text search pages are quite large. Most hand-held devices work fine on large pages, but not all. Screen readers in particular, can bog down on large pages. There are only five of these large pages in this web site, and while the text search feature can be helpful, it is not an essential part of the site. If you find your device does not like them, they are easy to avoid.
Of course, all modern web browsers have built in text search capabilities and you can use them on any page at any time. Many desktop browsers toggle this feature with the key combination Ctrl-F. Unfortunately, smart phone browsers use a variety of different methods of activating their search function. Try looking for something like "Find on page" in browser apps.
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.
This web site includes essentially the entire content of the book A Naturalist's Flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, California published by Barry A. Prigge and Arthur C. Gibson (abbreviated here as A N F). Please note that there may be occasional formatting errors in the A N F content as a result of its conversion to the electronic format used 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 notes provided at the end of each plant description. The content from A N F has its own table of contents here. Note that A N F is copyrighted material and is used here with permission.
The entire list of plants in A N F appears here. There are about 75 plants listed in A N F that we have not been able to find, in most cases because their only known historical locations have been lost to development. We indicate this by supplying a 'Not Available' placeholder thumbnail on the Plant Detail pages for these missing plants. It is possible that many of these no longer exist in the region, but they should still be considered likely candidates for encounters.
If you 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 a plant that we have not listed 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 Plant Detail pages containing the 'not available' placeholder. If you include these empty pages there are a total of 1085 plant species on this web site. Here is a link to a page that lists these empty Plant Detail pages.
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