Down to Earth: Homer Flowers: beautiful adaptation.

I have learned the name of just about every flower growing on the property of the Wynn Nature Center in Homer, Alaska. It has been part of my job, as a Naturalist Intern, to know the common name and a few facts about each plant. This may seem like a daunting task, but I have really enjoyed it. And it hasn't hurt that it has been my particular duty to take visitors on local plant identification walks once each week. This means I've had the opportunity to group plants by families and learn more detailed characteristics about them. It's a great research opportunity for someone as bookish as I am.

Hairy Rockcress is in the Mustard family.

Miraculously, most of the information has been imbedded in my brain through repetition and constant exposure. The only downside is that it's very difficult to walk past a plant anywhere and not mentally recite its name and statistics. Flowers cease to be just pretty things growing all around, instead they become like people I know too well. I can't separate their beauty from what I know about them. Such as, the plants in the Wintergreen family are named due to their evergreen leaves and are beneficial as a poultice for healing skin sores. They are not the source of wintergreen oil, however. The Wynn has three species of Wintergreens. The Wynn also has several species in the Rose family, including Nagoonberry, Trailing Raspberry, Sitka Burnet, Goat's Beard, and two species of wild rose. The two species of wild rose, Prickly and Nootka, can be distinguished by the quantity of thorns on the stem. Their thorns are straight, as opposed to curved thorns on cultivated garden variety roses. I could go on like this for hours.

Pink Pyrola is the largest of the Wintergreen family.

But knowledge can be power. For instance, it's handy to know what plant is poisonous to eat and what plant can help a wound heal. Edible plants are an especially useful thing to know about when spending a lot of time in the wilderness. Sometimes a plant can be both edible and toxic. Take the Red Elderberry, which is an endemic shrub in this part of Alaska. Its flowers can be made into a potent tea and its berries are often made into jellies and even wine. However, Red Elderberry seeds found in the berries contain cyanide compounds and are decidedly NOT good to eat, so they must be strained out of food products. Isn't it good that you know this now?

Red Elderberry with unripe fruits.

You may wonder why plants are so fickle, but they are actually amazingly well adapted for survival. Consider for a moment that plants, like animals, must defend themselves from those that would eat them as well as attract mates for procreation. Complicating this matter is the fact that plants are rooted to the ground and can neither run away from a predator nor chase after a mate. Thus, plants have devised a myriad of chemicals both to defend themselves and to attract facilitating pollinators. These chemical compounds can be targeted very specifically to attract a certain insect pollinator, such as with the rancid smell of the Chocolate Lily and its fly assistant. This specificity and the uncountable potential adaptations of plants to utilize chemicals to survive is why so many human medicines are derived from plants and not from animals. The willow shrub invented the salicylic acid in Aspirin, people simply stumbled upon it.

Chocolate Lily (or Northern Rice Root).

So, as you admire the varied beauty of the flowers (which are another adaptation of plants for getting attention from pollinators), I hope you can also appreciate the amazing ways in which they carve out a unique niche on the earth and contribute to survival of the human species as well.