What's Blooming Now?

The beginning flower identifier is usually overwhelmed by the variety and number of species. Most flower identification books show far more species than bloom around Los Alamos. But even here, there are hundreds of species. Happily, the most common ones are not too many for the interested person to master. To help with this, PEEC has inaugurated this Flower Guide to what's blooming NOW! As you can see, at present there are only a few plants blooming. As the season progresses some will stop blooming while others will start. This site will show only those that are pretty commonly seen on your walks. There will always be the plant you find that isn't here. For those, take a picture and bring it to PEEC for identification (best times are Tuesday and Friday afternoons).

By mid-summer, however, there are more than 20 plants at this web page, and again you might feel you're going into overload. What to do? Perhaps the best way is to visit this site once a week. Each time you will find a few new ones, but you will already be familiar with the older ones. By mid-summer most of the photos will be old friends, and you will be able to learn the new ones without too much effort.

To aid in identifying some of our common plants, PEEC has published some little booklets: The 12 LIttle Composites of Summer, Erigerons, etc. So visit this site, drop by PEEC, and enjoy our splendid native wildflowers. The PEEC gift shop also sells a wonderful sketchbook of plants from all over the state, "Flowering Plants of New Mexico" by Robert DeWitt Ivey. This book has far more species than grow around here, but as you visit this site and learn our local ones, you can note them in Ivey's book. All the sketches are in black & white, so each time you find a plant you can color it in making the ones you learned easy to find. Remember what people say over and over again: "Until I learned their names, they weren't there!"

To see all the WBN photographs, have a look at the What's NOT Blooming slide show.