Welcome to Fine Flowers of the Valley – a one minute guide to the wildflowers of the Teton Valley. And as of the summer of 2024, now including the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve in Grand Teton National Park. Why the change? Because I’ve been spending the summer as a volunteer at the Preserve and can’t help myself.
I’m calling this a “one minute guide” because I’m writing it for the non-botanist fan of wildflowers who can, perhaps, only go to the field with children, or dogs, or for an hour before something else… someone who has, perhaps, no botanical training, doesn’t carry a hand lens, and has no idea what a superior ovary is… someone who can, perhaps, do little more than take a cell phone photo to remind them of what they saw and what they want to identify.
I also thought about calling it a “plain language key” to the wildflowers of the Valley. The idea here is that you can describe what you see in plain language, or select from a list of “adjectives” – descriptors – that might fit. Hopefully, that will then narrow the choices down to something you recognize.
I feel particularly qualified to approach this problem because I am not a botanist myself. Well, actually, I am a botanist, just not “that kind of botanist”. I have spent a half-century studying plants, as a physiologist, but have no real training in systematics or taxonomy, i.e. in identifying plants.
As a child, I learned bird identification by going through all the pictures in field guides repeatedly, but that doesn’t really work with plants… there are simply too many of them and no book is anywhere near complete. Still, a good deal of what is on the site is based on just that, going through books to find a picture resembling the plant I have in my hand (or on my cell phone). Some identifications have also been aided by use of the iNaturalist tools. Those are cool, and some of the volunteers working to verify IDs are tremendous and dedicated. Nevertheless, what you get depends on the quality of any photos you take as well as on the complexity of the species.
As a guide to wildflowers, this is a work in progress. My first field season was 2019, and although there are more 300 species on the site as of the end of the 2022 season, some are incomplete and the list itself is clearly incomplete. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions, suggestions, corrections or additions… whether or not you are “that kind of botanist”.
And, as a website, it is also a work in progress. I have definitely concentrated on content and on tools for identification of plants new to you. I hope it works for that.
Thanks
John Cheeseman
Victor
Oh yeah! One last thing… If you are just starting to use this site, think about reading the About pages. There are some things there that might could really help to make this work for you.
