Digital Herbarium
of Flowering Plants
of the Pacific North-West

In the summer of 2013 I visited the Pacific North-Western region of North-America, with a focus on exploring the region around Vancouver, Canada and the Olympic peninsula in the state of Washington, USA. Already at former stays I was fascinated by the beautiful landscape with its snow-capped mountain ranges and volcanoes, dense forests, rough and rocky ocean shores and sandy beaches (Figs. 1, 2, 3).
In this terrain, situated close to the ocean, the landscape is foremost characterized by its lush and evergreen vegetation, forming especially at the West coast of the Olympic mountains an unique habitat recognized as temperate rain-forest. Such forests are formed by the mild oceanic climate, which, in combination with the elevation of the mountains, guarantees a higher than average precipitation and results subsequently in a steady supply of water and a high air humidity within the interior of the forests.

Fig. 1: A typical conifer forest near the Pacific coast of the Olympic peninsula, WA, USA.

The rain-forests, but also the much drier inland forests, are chiefly formed by conifers: Western red cedar, Yellow cedar, Douglas Fir, Hemlocks and Sitka spruce are the most prominent species. The conditions for these trees are such favorable that the Olympic peninsula is home to some of largest and oldest conifers known in North-America. In the understorey, at streams or river-banks Red Alder or Broad-leaved Maple occur as the main species of deciduous trees, while thickets in the underbrush, at sites of disturbance or at forest edges are formed by fruiting shrubs like species of the Rubus genus (salmonberry, blackberry, thimbleberry) or of the diverse Vaccinium genus (e.g. huckleberry, blueberry). In some places whole areas of the underbrush are rendered impassable by patches of the heavily thorned devil's club. Additionally, many species of ferns, mosses and lichens populate these forests and thrive well on the year-round availability of water and humidity.
Despite the dominating role of the conifers, the many flowering plants, growing at creek sides, mountain meadows, rocky ridges, road- and trailsides or just in the dense underbrush form the colorful and perfurming accents in this landscape, fascinating the observer's eye by their beauty and their intricate morphology.
Thus, equipped with a hand-lens, a basic set of maps and the very recommendable and comprehensive guide to the flora of the Pacific North-West by J. Pojar and A. McKinnon ^[g01], I started to explore the Olympic mountains on foot, by way of its many hiking trails. Soon this journey was transformed from a leisure trip to a botanic field-trip, as I questioned deeper into the various plants encountered on my wanderings.
With growing experience I started to locate, identify and photograph many of these wildflowers. As a result this little collection of plant images was created, inspired by a similar project, which presents plants found in my home country Germany (see Plants in NRW).
Without the ambition to be in any way complete, this collection nevertheless presents a cross-section through many of the plant families occuring in the Pacific North-West and contains some of the most interesting and beautiful species of flowering plants found in this region. But it should not go unnoticed, that due to the attractive nature of the subject, many web-sites already exist, which cover the same topic and treat the vegetation and especially the wildflowers of this region in a somewhat more comprising and professional way than I'm able to provide. Despite this obvious redundancy, I thought it would be more reasonable to publish these images, than to store and forget them on a harddisk.
The identification of the plants is based on the already mentioned work of Pojar et al. ^[g01] and was supplemented and augmented by various other sources, like the guide to Western forests by Whitney ^[g02] or the image collection of the herbarium of the University of Washington at the Burke museum ^[w03] (in the following referred to as the WTU image collection ).

Fig. 2: A section of the rugged Pacific coast of the Olympic peninsula, WA, USA.

Although many species were identified in the field, a great fraction was only identified by their photographs (see also the section about the used equipment below). Naturally, such an approach limits the accuracy of the identification, because important characters were often not recognized at the time the picture was taken and thus were later not available for identification. This happened in particular, when a species was encountered for the first time. Therefore, species for which identification is regarded unsafe are marked by a "*" character in front of their name. Most of the English plant names were also taken over from Pojar et al., again supplemented from other sources, like the English Wikipedia or the WTU image collection. Additionally, the German plant names are mentioned where applicable. Blooming times were mainly found in the WTU Image Collection, but it should be kept in mind that the given dates are only approximate and can vary considerably in different locations, especially in dependence on elevation. Botanic authorship and the list of original publications were investigated for each taxon at the International Plants Name Index (IPNI) ^[w09]. These and other web resources, which I found quite useful for identifying, describing and distinguishing the various species from my photographs, are listed below at World Wide Web resources.

The taxonomic ordering used in the present collection is, with minor adaptions, mainly based on the so-called Cronquist system, which I personally prefer over the more recent taxonomies, like the work of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (throughout the text referred to as APG). Where feasible, taxonomic alternatives or concurrent views are shortly discussed in the 'Notices' sections below each taxon entry.
Although the APG system is now regarded as a de-facto standard, as it integrates the latest result of taxonomic research with its many phylogenetic works, the resulting taxonomic framework appears still to be in state of high flux and changes frequently. Moreover, in my opinion the phylogenetic methods employed in a great share of the underlying publications can be questioned in many cases, as a lot of these research works are solely based on the comparison of ribosomal DNA/RNA (rDNA or rRNA, respectively) fragments, especially those occuring in the chloroplasts. This methodology should provide, in theory, the most accurate 'evolutionary clock', as it can be conjectured that the DNA of such an essential cellular mechanism as the ribosomes would change only slowly over time. Although such molecular methods properly delineate the relative distances of inheritance of these sequences by way of statistical probabilities, they still reflect only the matrilineal lineages of descendance, as the chloroplasts within the angiosperms are in most, if not all cases, strictly inherited from the female gametophytes. Therefore, evolutionary innovations (autapomorphies) transferred or introduced through the patrilineal lineage or by the even more important mode of recombinant, meiotic events are in most cases not taken into consideration and thus evolutionary distances, stemming from the aforementioned events and leading to many, more or less subtile and intricate adaptions and morphological variations are not well reflected by way of such strictly matrilineal phylogeny. Thus, in my humble opinion, molecular phylogeny should always be interpreted in the context of morphological/anatomical features and their respective variation, at least as long as whole genome comparisons are not available. That said, it should not get neglected, that many taxonomic works just do exactly so and use the method of molecular phylogeny as an additional tool to augment or support the finding of 'classical' comparative morphology.
I'm not an expert taxonomist, but I'm well aware, that with such a view I only reflect the opinion of a shrinking minority and naturally (or more precise, culturally) the growing trend of molecular analysis is in line with the modern trends of biology, where gene prospecting and molecular cloning has developed into a mature industry. Apparently it is easier to invest in products, like machines and chemicals, which in the very end benefit the few stakeholders of the manufacturing companies, than to spent a lot of time and financial expense in well educated taxonomists, which get along solely with a trained and scrutinizing eye, possibly augmented by an old-fashioned hand-lens or microscope.

Fig. 3: View on the peaks of the Olympic mountains in the interior of the Olympic National Park, WA, USA.

Although I do not have the numbers of the financial support of these differing activities at hand, I can imagine this relationship resembles more a Mt. Everest beside a heap of sand...
This is certainly not meant as a condemnation of the molecular and phylogenetic technologies as a whole and I do not want to illegitimate the numerous authors and researches coping with molecular phylogeny, but I do see and experience, not at least on myself, that the way how knowledge about the real entities of nature, namely the organisms, is gathered, interpreted and compiled, has shifted to an artificial, in-silico mode, while the basic common-ground, as well as the more sophisticated knowledge about the properties and morphologies of organisms is dwindling and on its retreat within the broader community of biologists. Thus, it appears to me, especially when looking at the list of botanical authors, that most of the morphological observations and descriptions are stemming from former centuries and that the knowledge about how to observe, distinguish and interpret the intricate features of plants and other organisms is thinning out. It would for example be very interesting to do a survey among modern molecular biologists, which covers only basic taxonomic and morphological questions and watch if the outcome of such a survey supports that theses biologists still know what they are dealing with...
Anyhow, I've drifted away, as the purpose of this web site is certainly not a discussion of the somewhat philosophical issues of modern taxonomy. So concludingly, a few remarks on the used equipment and the mode of the image retrieval should be given:
All of the pictures shown were taken by an affordable digital pocket camera, which bears the advantage of being robust, water-tight, light-weight and having an easy handling, but also exhibits some disadvantages in certain situations, where more professional equipment would surely produce better results. In general, the close-up macro images are of good quality, while the half-distant shots of a plant's habitus or of panoramic views are often of minor quality.
Additionally, the light conditions in the dense forests can be found very unfavorable and it was sometimes difficult to take well adjusted photographs, as darkest shade and brightest light occured together, bordered sharply at each other and covered often a whole, single plant. Thus, problems with the white balance of the digital images were frequently encountered and often it occured, that the range of brightness was not sufficiently covered. Also, I experienced that the auto-focus function had difficulties to focus on slender plants in short distance (0,5 - 2 m), so photographs of this kind were most of the time found slightly out of focus, rendering these images worthless or of lesser quality. Another difficulty arose from my own mode of movement: As I took mostly day-long hikes of 20-25 miles, the routes demanded often precise timing. Thus, as I took a lot of photographs (sometimes more than 350 per hike), accounting for at least one minute per session, I found myself easily spending hours of just taking pictures! This time had to be subtracted from the hiking time and I had to take care to reach the daily goal or find my way back home in time. Thus, there were certainly restrictions on the time available for taking well adjusted photographs and many attractive motives were left out. The same restrictions applied also for proper identification of the plants, so that the identification was often postponed to the interpretation of the made photographs. Moreover, many trails were quite strenous and bodily exhausting, so each stop for taking pictures meant an interruption of the walking rythm and added to the heartbeat, as I had to halt, loosen and release the backpack, catch my breath, compose myself and ready the camera. This altogether rendered photographing with a calm hand in many instances problematic.
Nevertheless, may the interested visitors of this site enjoy the images, get inspired to start 'botanizing' themselves or just increase his or her awareness of these beautiful organisms on the next outdoor trip.
The photographs can freely be used for educational or personal use, as long as the copyright notice and proper referencing is kept in place. Some of the pictures were made public domain, e.g. by providing them to the Wikimedia project (available under the Commons Creative License) or the Burke Herbarium Image Collection. Larger, full quality images are available on request under the e-mail address found in the Legal & Disclaimer section.

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