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SF Bay Area Wildflowers

The purpose of this page is to provide a framework for collecting pictures and descriptions of the wildflowers I've seen on my hikes in 1995. The organization comes from the Peterson Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers. The page numbers refer to my reference favorite: Spring Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Region.

My favorite book for learning to identify SF Bay Area wildflowers by picture is Plants of the Coastal Redwoods. The color is wonderful. I used it to learn in two ways. The first was just going out on the trail, finding a flower, skipping to the right color section in the book, and flipping the pages like mad until I found what I was looking at. Later on, when I started yearning to see a particular new flower I'd note that it liked a particular microbiotic community e.g. Redwood Forest, then I'd choose my hikes accordingly.

Later on, I used Wildflowers of the West to learn to identify flowers by their component parts. I find that the more I learn the more I see, and the more I enjoy walking.

Sometimes I just feel like going back to page flippin' so I drag out Wild Flowers of Marin to try and identify some new species when I'm pretty sure what the family is.

Over time, I hope to add illustrations and an automated "key" to determine what family a flower is in using Inference's software product, CBR2.