Monday, August 17, 2009

Bad photos of wildflowers

My partner in crime headed off to work on Saturday night, so I took this opportunity to do a wildflower ride up Millcreek Canyon. I hate stopping when I'm with other riders to take pictures, but when I'm solo, I can do whatever I want. I wanted to go search for two toxic wildflowers I read about in this guy's awesome blog. If you hike or bike around Salt Lake, and you ever wonder, "what was that cool flower I saw on my ride yesterday?", chances are, this guy will have blogged about it in the last two weeks, and made botany interesting and funny while he is at it.


Anyway, I wanted to see if I could find Western Monkshood



















and Corn Lily

























Western Monkshood is wicked poisonous, so I tried not to touch it as I was snapping this horrible picture, but immediately after I came out of the brush, I felt a serious case of what felt like stinging nettle. I had the stinging/numbness on my leg all night and into the next day. I'm pretty sure it was a real bad case of stinging nettle, but it freaked me out that I had been poisoned by the Monkshood for a while.

The Corn Lily has been implicated in a bunch of births of one-eyed lambs in Idaho. I tried to stay really far away from that one.





Also recognized the Western Coneflower, which looks like it is all dried up and past its prime, but this is what it really looks when blooming (if you can tell from my horrible cell phone pic).



Earlier in the weekend, Drew put up some sturdy shelves for me in the garage to store big pots. Thanks, Drew.








2 comments:

  1. I love the pictures of the flowers. I didn't know there were poisonous flowers! Where did you ride?

    Kendra

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  2. I doubt it was the Monkshood that gave you the stinging/numbness, mainly because the initial symptoms are usually gastro-intestinal. Numbness is supposed to be a more advanced symptom. But hey, I'm not even a botanist, much less a doctor!

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