(Above: Mountain Bush Lupine, Parish's Snowberry, and Mountain Phacelia)
With the heat starting in the lower parts of LA County, Sagedog and I decided to head up high to look for some blooms. Due to heavy storms over the winter, most of Angeles Crest Highway is closed this year from Mt Wilson to Mt Baden-powell. This leaves the Mountain High area as the easiest place to botanize over 7000' in LA County.
We spent the day on East Blue Ridge Road which winds along the top of the hills that make up the Mountain High Ski resort. The road starts out at 7300' elevation and gets up to 8200' in parts. These higher elevations capture much more water/snow and have milder temperatures so we end up with very similar plant communities to the Sierra Nevada Mountains even though we were less than 40 miles from Downtown Los Angeles.
The dominant vegetation along the road is Pine forests. Although LA County is more famous for its palm trees and coastal sage scrub, Calflora.org lists 11 species of Pine as native to our small zone. Botanizing in these habitats usually means looking for gaps in the canopy where understory plants can get enough sunlight to grow. In the gaps, I got lucky and shot Lupinus albifrons ssp. austromontanus (Mountain Bush Lupine) and Symphoricarpos rotundifolius var. parishii (Parish's Snowberry) for the first time.
There are a lot of different Lupine taxa in LA County, 43 by my count and 6 of which are varieties of Lupinus albifrons. When ID'ing Lupines, it is important to remove the wing petals on one of the flowers to see the hair patterns on the keel. This one was glabrous (no hair) but many taxa have different patterns. The perennial Lupines are far from figured out and iNat even calls this taxa Lupinus excutibus ssp austromontanus. I like to use Jepson and Calflora names so I'm sticking with albifrons.
The Symphoricarpos genus is fairly easy to ID by the leaves in LA. I've seen it many times before but this was the first I saw blooming. Note the cool beetle pollinating the flowers.
Symphoricarpos is in the Caprifiolaceae family and therefore is a cousin of our native Honeysuckles in the Lonicera genus. Parish's Snowberry lives in higher parts of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Transverse Mountains, and Peninsular mountains.
I ended up shooting Phacelia imbricata var patula (Mountain Phacelia) again. It's a showy plant with 3 different forms in LA. The Jepson Key for Phacelia distinguishes the varieties of Mountain Phacelia by number of lobes on the basal leaves and by petal shape.
There are a few seeps and springs mixed into the forests where I saw Erythranthe moschata (Musk Monkeyflower) and Lillium parryi (Lemon Lily) for the first time. The wet spots usually have some very interesting plants.
Musk Monkeyflower is a slimy little plant that was covering top of a seep on the roadside. I thought it was the common E. floribundus (also slimy) at first, but these plants had larger flowers so I decided to shoot it anyway. We have a lot of Monkeyflowers in LA County and they're generally spilt into two genus's, Erythranthe and Diplacus. Jepson splits them by saying Erythranthe plants have a pedicel that is longer than the calyx while Diplacus plants have pedicels that are shorter.
Lemon Lily is a 1B.2 ranked California Rare Plant. It mainly occurs in high-elevation wet areas of SoCal mountains, but there are a couple of sky-island populations in southern Arizona. I like to think of the San Gabriels as sky islands in their own right. L parryi is one of two plants in the Lilium genus in LA County. Its orange blooming cousin L. humboldtii (Humboldt Lily) occupies the same niches but at lower elevations here. Some botanists think Lemon Lilies were once much more common.
In between the forests are Ceanothus and Ribes scrublands with lots of annuals and grasses in the mix. The scrubland plants are much smaller and have to adapt to drier and windier conditions than their friends in the more mesic Pine forests. In these xeric habitats, I saw the grass Elymus elymoides (Squirreltail Grass) for the first time. Squirreltail grass is native to much of western North America but not very common in LA.
I also reshot Solanum xanti (Purple Nightshade) and Leptosiphon breviculus (Mojave Linanthus). Purple Nightshade is one of the widest ranging plants in LA. I've seen S. xanti at Santa Fe Dam in full sun, less than a mile from the ocean in Topanga Canyon in deep shade, and then here at 8200' in Ceanothus scrub. I can't think of any other plants that can tolerate all these climates and I've heard speculation that the taxa could be split into some subspecies or varieties. Mojave Linanthus has a narrow range, mostly occurring in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains.
To end the day, I shot the invasive Bromus tectorum (Cheatgrass) while hoping it was one of the native grasses. Cheatgrass is one of Western North Americas older invasive plants, the USFS thinks the plant had multiple introductions from Europe and was present in much of its current range by the early 1900's.
It was a great trip overall. I've been looking for Lilium parryi for a long time and it was nice for Sage and I to escape the heat. Thanks for reading!
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