4/19/12- Botanical Gardens Trip

Starting up after a long hiatus...
Walking Biology 2012 has begun with two nice field trips so far:

Carpinteria Bluffs to see the harbor seals

And the SB Botanic Garden to observe flowers and their pollinators.

Feel free to post comments or your photos from the trips!

Photos: Terrestrial plants & pollinators (SB Botanic Garden)

Here is a slideshow with photos from our fifth field trip to the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden to check out terrestrial plants and pollinators.

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden was beautiful! This is a fantastic site to view native plants of California – all in one convenient and accessible setting. In addition to enjoying the scenery, our goal was to view plants and pollinators and talk about the relationships between them.

There is lots of good and reader-friendly information on pollination syndromes to follow-up if you are interested. A couple sites on the web are here:

from Wikipedia
from the US Forest Service

One of the plants we saw was the chaparral yucca, Yucca whipplei (we also saw these on our first field trip - up to E. Camino Cielo). As we predicted from the floral characters, this plant is indeed moth-pollinated. Similar to other yuccas, this one has an interesting life history, in that it flowers only once in its life time – after it has reached six or seven years old - produces seeds and then dies. Pollination in yuccas is almost always completely dependent on a single moth, which is almost always heavily dependent on its particular yucca species for development of its larvae. For the chaparral yucca, the moth species is Tegeticula maculata, which deposits its eggs into the yucca flowers ovules while also pollinating the flower. Read more about it here at Wayne’s Word.

A stunning flowering shrub that I hadn’t seen before was Carpenteria californica – tree anemone. This species is native to the foothills of the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains (Fresco County). I saw bumblebees visiting the flowers; perhaps they were attracted to the bright yellow stamens. This photo is from http://www.laspilitas.com/

I highly recommend visiting the Botanic Garden throughout the year to take advantage of the opportunity to see flowering in all our native flora!

Directions to the SB Botanic Garden