Wildflowers of McLaren Park: Iris douglasiana
My neighbor—who is also my friend—and I end up on lots of walks together. Like me, she loves plants. She's currently taking a plant ID course at City College, and oftentimes our walks become practice for class. While I'm okay at Latin names, she's quickly overtaking my skill set. But even when we aren't tossing Latin names around, we are enjoying what we see, and both of us have walked all the trails of the park enough that we know where our favorite treasures are. Both of us have separately noticed and together celebrated a large clump of Pacific iris, Iris douglasiana , not too far off a trail in a dip that fills slightly with rainwater in the winter but is otherwise bone dry. It's a healthy grouping, currently loaded with flowers, and it's been there for years. In our neighborhood, the native iris is pale lavender with deep purple stripes and yellow patches on the falls, but in other places, the iris can be deep purple, or periwinkle with more defined yellow ...
