California Fan Palm (Washingtonia filifera), the only palm native to the western U.S., is fire-adapted. Its trunk resists burning, only losing some of its outer layers, leaving a charred layer to protect it from future fires. More charring means more resistance.
Red Maids (Calandrinia menziesii) get their magenta hue from betalain pigments—found only in the plant order Caryophyllales and some fungi. These are the same pigments that give beets their deep red color!
Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) is bursting with bright red berries this time of year, a wintertime food source for birds and mammals, and a classic sight in California’s winter landscapes. Early settlers called it “California holly,” which may have inspired the name Hollywood!
#CaliforniaFloristicProvince #LearnAboutNature #NatureInFocus
#DiscoverWildCalifornia #CalFlora #nature #flora
I have taken exactly 1 programming class. I know about this *squints at gap between fingers* much Python.
I really, really want to build a tiny little database thingie for plant taxonomy. I have enough Python written up to make a JSON dictionary or a CSV that I can then feed to a web thingie that makes pretty force-directed graphs. I'm a very visual person, so to relate to this data I want floating bubbles GIMME FLOATING BUBBLES THEY MAKE ME HAPPY.
I'm trying to figure out how to download/scrape or whatever the info from places like calflora and the USDA plants database to populate my thing. In the meantime I've manually typed up about 500 partial entries.
I'd really like to at least be able to generate a taxonomy tree. From the species binomial it should be easy to just relate each plant to its parent branches-- species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom. Simple, right? Ish?
Later I also want to be able to tell my bubble cloud to rearrange itself according to, say, which plants need more or less water, which ones are edible, which ones grow together in different habitats in different areas, all sorts of different things.
Oof. I miss being in class, where I could go to the computer lab and hunker over this sort of thing with buddies.
#Taxonomy
#Botany
#NativePlants
#CalFlora
#Python
#DataVisualization
#Calflora has over 2,200 plants native to #California in its catalog. I was not aware of the variety of “dandelions” just in this state.
Gina
Violet Madder
Cecelia