Today's image is another scan of a hand-painted lantern slide by John Davidson from the early 1900s.

British Columbia is famous for its stunning alpine meadows. They occur in a few select areas where the right combination of ecological factors such as water, sunlight, fire and (particularly) soils are not conducive to tree colonization. Instead of the trees which dominate most mountains up to the treeline, open vistas of brightly-coloured wildflowers explode for a few weeks every year. Two of the finest (and most easily accessible) examples are the Taylor and Black Tusk Meadows in Garibaldi Provincial Park.

Sadly, due to a policy of fire suppression and the result of global warming, it is likely by the lifetimes of your children's grandchildren (if not sooner) that most of alpine meadows of British Columbia will either be lost or mere remnants of their former glory. The trees will gain the upper hand and colonize these fragile areas. For some reading on the topic in the broad sense, see The State of Ecological and Earth Sciences in Mountain Areas, and particularly “Effect of Rising Treeline on Connectivity of Alpine Meadows for Butterfly Populations” by Roland, Keyghobadi and Matter.

If you'd like to learn more about Garibaldi Provincial Park and you live in the Vancouver area, please consider yourself invited to my talk on Thursday night at VanDusen Botanical Garden's Cedar Lecture Series (registration / tickets). The title of the presentation is “The Flora of Garibaldi Provincial Park - A Historical Retrospective”; the talk incorporates many of Davidson's lantern slides of the area he helped explore and map in the 1910s and 1920s.

Photography resource link: The Art of Photography by Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape, with commentary on light, focal lengths, the zen of photography and cost. One point often made by many of the professional photographers (and reiterated in this article) is that they say that they only take one or two images worth sharing or exhibiting after an entire day of photography. I suppose I have a lower standard of what is worthy of sharing by necessity of the daily pace, because I certainly couldn't spend every single day taking the “one best” photograph to share the next day (well, I suppose I could, but I don't think I'd stay employed very long).

Updated November 3, 2005 at 4:18pm PDT: The server is back up and running. Right now, I'm not aware of any bugs. If you find something amiss, please let me know. -- Daniel. Please note the following – The garden's web server will be down for maintenance on Thursday, November 3rd from 7:45 AM PDT until completion (anticipated to be early afternoon). BPotD will not be available at this time.

Today, I'm dipping into the archival photographs from the John Davidson lantern slide collection (read more about this collection). Originally taken in black-and-white, this slide has been hand-painted, including all of the roughly five hundred pink flowers of bitter-root, Lewisia rediviva.

I'm guessing on the location (near Cache Creek), but the other slides in sequence are from the area. I was also in the region earlier in the year scouting for a similar profusion of blooms, and although I found some plants, I was at least two weeks too late. Had I found them, though, I likely wouldn't have been able to take a photograph like this; it was a cloudy day, and the flowers only open in the sun.

The epithet rediviva translates to “restored to life”. The story, via Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia by Parish et al., is that the pressed herbarium specimen from a plant collected by Meriwether Lewis in 1806 still showed signs of life months after being dried. When the herbarium specimen was planted (!), the plant grew, duly earning its name.

Botany resource link: The controversial, but interesting, botanist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz – “an overly enthusiastic, but accurate observer driven by a monomaniacal desire to name every object he encountered in nature.”

Sumallo Grove is the site of the largest trees in British Columbia's E.C. Manning Provincial Park. Seen in this photograph taken yesterday are Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) and Douglas fir (or as some would say, douglas) aka Pseudotsuga menziesii. Another large tree species found in the grove but absent in this photograph is grand fir, Abies grandis. Vine maples, or Acer circinatum, provide the colour in this image. In exposed sites elsewhere in the park, the vine maples displayed brilliant orange-red colours; in the shady forest, though, the vine maples only showcased a bright yellow.

Botany resource link: This is pretty nifty – an at-a-glance guide to Autumn Colours in forests managed by the UK Forestry Commission. The site also includes a photo gallery of autumn colours.

A photograph from the John Davidson lantern slide collection (more about the collection in this entry) that lacks any associated information. Who is the man in the photograph? Where is this stand of Sitka spruce? Or, more likely, “where was this stand of Sitka spruce?”, as this photograph seems to be taken from the edge of a clearcut. When was this photograph taken?

For more information about these largest of spruces, though, there are thankfully some resources at hand via the Virginia Tech Forestry Department and Tree Species of the World's Boreal Forests.

Botany resource link: Taxonomic Botany and Floristics in North America, North of Mexico: A Review by James Reveal and James Pringle, details a history of taxonomic botany that spans five centuries. It was written for the Flora of North America project.

Seventy million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, this part of Alberta would have been forest and swamp. Many of the plant fossils in this area from that time are relatives of plants found in modern day China and South America. A walk through UBC's Asian Garden with its dawn-redwoods, ginkgos and magnolias (or the future Araucaria Grove) can well be imagined as experiencing an environment not unlike the one roamed by the dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous.

Horseshoe Canyon is partially protected by The Nature Conservancy of Canada. The Nodwell family, particularly the late Leila Nodwell (interview and article), have contributed greatly to preserving the site.

I'm going to start a new addition to Botany Photo of the Day today - a link to an extra resource that I've found helpful to learn about botany, or photography, or some other topic. I figure if it's been useful to me, it might also be useful to you. I'm also going to bookmark and tag each link on this del.icio.us page.

Photography resource link: The Luminous Landscape - I particularly found the “Understanding Series” and “Essays” of value.

Grasslands National Park, located in the southwest corner of Saskatchewan, protects some of the largest remnant blocks of (nearly) undisturbed mixed-grass prairie in North America. However, the prairie is not as it was prior to European arrival: the disappearance of bison with the associated loss of grazing pressure and soil disturbance means the dynamics and composition of the plant community have changed. Parks Canada is reintroducing bison into the park this upcoming winter in a limited area, with the intent of restoring the land to a more natural state (and likely also increasing visitors - we saw only about a dozen people in the park proper all day long).

There are no apparent plans, however, to reintroduce the plains population of the grizzly bear (more).

This alpine tree-line is photographed from a close enough distance to illustrate the decrease in both density and size of trees as conditions become unfavourable for growth at higher elevations. The green band of plants growing above the tree-line consist of shrubby mountain heathers (Phyllodoce spp. and Cassiope) and various alpine wildflowers (including Castilleja spp.), but those also taper off with increasing elevation, leaving bare, exposed rock on the mountaintops.

The photograph was taken in evening light from the short trail to Peyto Lake along the Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park.

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) is seen in the distance, eking out an existence. It is perched on the eroded bottom of the long-gone, ancient Tranquille Lake northwest of present-day Kamloops, British Columbia (Google Maps link centred on the area where this photograph was taken - zoom in for a close-up). This is the 15 000ha Lac Du Bois Grasslands Provincial Park, one of three provincial parks that protect British Columbia grasslands.

Photographed while on a southern ascent of Mara Hill (in the southeast portion of the park) I was struck by the lines of both the near and distant rockforms. The pine appearing in the groove was the icing on the cake.

I wasn't searching for any specific plants, but I did find one I've always wanted to see (I'll feature it tomorrow - it's cool). The point of the trip was to see hoodoos, naturally-formed columns of rock. The hoodoos of this area do not seem to be well-known, perhaps overshadowed by the Deadman's Creek Hoodoos further northwest. I still thought they were impressive, including the one that I've dubbed Rabbit Eating Douglas Fir Hoodoo.

I was planning on using this entry to also highlight the BC Grasslands Blog, but I see that it is being abandoned, and they are pursuing a newsletter instead. Somewhat disappointing.

Honeymoon Bay Ecological Reserve, near Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, BC, was preserved for the dense concentration of Erythronium revolutum (pink fawn lily) that can be found blooming in late April. Knowing that this year's spring has been quite warm, I didn't hold out much hope for seeing many (or any) of the fawn lilies in bloom last weekend; as it turned out, I only found two plants blooming amongst thousands of seed capsules. I did however discover that the timing of the flowers roughly coincides with the blooming of the same species in the Native Garden, so I now have a timely indicator of when to visit the area in future years.

The trip had value beyond scouting for future trips; the trilliums and bleeding hearts were in full swing, and the vanilla-leaf (Achlys triphylla) was just starting to flower. The scenery was outstanding as well, so I was inspired to try out a few landscape shots, like this one.

Sutton Creek borders one side of the ecological reserve. I was intrigued by the moss-laden overhanging branches of Acer macrophyllum (big-leaf maples) that lined much of the creek, so this is my attempt at illustrating them.

One other thing to note is the “white-barked” trees on the other side of the creek. This is Alnus rubra (red alder), which actually has grey bark. Here though, the bark is near-completely covered with white crustose lichens, and I'll guess that one of the culprits is Graphis scripta (hieroglyphics lichen).