Today's entry was supposed to be posted yesterday, but we're still trying to determine the optimal settings for the new server, so it ended up crashing again last night. It shouldn't be too much longer before things are back to being stable, though.

I briefly spoke to the Vancouver Rhododendron Society last night about some of my trips to the Siskiyous, so while working through the images for that presentation, I pulled this one for BPotD today.

My inclination is to call this Jeffrey pine, but other common names are also in use, including bull pine and sapwood pine. This is primarily a California species, but it can also be found in the Siskiyous area of southwest Oregon and northern Baja California. As noted in the link, "Jeffrey pine often dominates and is almost entirely restricted to soils derived from ultramafic rocks- peridotites and their alteration products, serpentinites", and this is indeed the case in the Siskiyous, where the presence of Jeffrey pine indicates serpentine soils. In non-serpentine soils nearby, the similar Pinus ponderosa grows instead.

Commercially, the two species of pine are treated as indistinct, but there are biological differences. Some of these are summarized in the Wikipedia article on Pinus jeffreyi, such as Pinus jeffreyi having overall larger cones with inward-pointing barbs and needles that are glaucous (having a whitish to bluish waxy or powdery coating, such that the colour appears muted). Naturally-occurring hybrids between the two species are rare, in part because of the different times of pollen production and reception: in areas where the two species overlap, Pinus ponderosa releases/receives pollen 4-6 (-8?) weeks prior to Pinus jeffreyi. Wood chemistry is also different with respect to presence / absence of certain monoterpenes; n-heptane, n-nonane, and n-undecane are present in Pinus jeffreyi and seemingly absent in ponderosa pine (see: Anderson, AB, et al.. 1969. Monoterpenes, fatty and resin acids of Pinus ponderosa and Pinus jeffreyi. Phytochemistry. 8(5): 873-875.).

Conifers.org, as always, has excellent additional reading about conifer species: Pinus jeffreyi, and Calphotos has additional images: Pinus jeffreyi.

A note for local readers: I'll be speaking on Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia on Monday @ noon -- one of my favourite visual presentations.

Botany / gardening resource link: Florida's Native Wildflowers from the Florida Wildflower Foundation was recently launched, containing a weblog, a bloom map, a section on growing Florida wildflowers and much more. Definitely worth a peek and the bloom map is something to keep in mind if you plan to travel around the state.

A quick entry today; Claire is busy with exams, while I continue to wrestle with the web server and the concurrent introduction of our new collections database here at the garden.

Of my two major trips this past autumn, I was late for the autumn colours in Canada's Rockies and early for the autumn colours in Quebec and New Brunswick. For the latter, there were a few--very few--areas that were approaching peak when I was there in late September, and this hillside outside of Val-Lambert was one of them.

For the interest of local readers, a couple of upcoming lectures you may be interested in. Tonight at 7:30, VanDusen Botanical Garden hosts its Cedar Lecture Series with Chris Czajkowski speaking on "Alpine Plants of Nuk Tessli". Attentive BPotD readers will note that Chris has contributed photographs to BPotD from time to time,. This is a great opportunity to see a number of Chris's images at once, complete with accompanying stories (and there are many).

Next week at Monday noon, I'll be giving my final lecture in UBC's International Year of Biodiversity series, and ending on an upbeat note with Plants Inspiring Technology.