Pine cones!

The grey pine that I saw on my trip to the Sierras yesterday:

They are common in CA foothills, kind of droopy looking pines with 3 grey-green needles per bundle. They also have main branches located relatively low on the main trunk and compared to other pines, they are sparsely leaved.

Coulter pine, which has really cool cones that have curved scales:

Common in Bay Area and southern CA, 3 needles per bundle with stiff green needles. It's cone is of a lethal size. By which I mean you really, really don't want one to land on you.

Lodgepole pine, with HUGE cones. As our herbarium curator told us: don't eat lunch under this tree!

This thing only has 2 needles per bundle. It's common to mid and upper elevation pine forests in Seirra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. That lab manual next to it is just about 8.5 by 11 inches, so you have something to scale it to.

Another one of the cool coulter cone. (See? Alliteration makes everything better.)

I just typed up four paragraphs and then I moved my mouse and then disappeared!
The undo is not working, and neither is jiggling the back and forth options.

Typing it all up again will take too long.

Gah.

I am convinced

Asteraceae is very diverse. There are gazillions of taxons out there and THEY ALL HAVE YELLOW FLOWERS.

Gah.

The joys of floristic courses

As the taxons build up, the lab quizzes have become progressively harder. Now I'm expected to tell apart this from this on sight.

Also, Blogger? Your image upload sucks.

Manzanita

They're pretty neat looking. The manzanita has these urn-shaped flowers and can be confused with Arbutus, or madrone. You can tell the two apart because manzanita has leaves that are rounder and gray-ish on both sides and madrone has leaves that are shiny/darker on one side.