Bloomin’ Bidwell Park: A Guide to the Flowers

Flowers

The guide

This is a site that I believe fills a need for a simple, intuitive guide to the flowers of Upper Bidwell Park, Chico California. This is the kind of guide that I wish had been around when I started looking at the flowers. I’ve started with the most obvious flowers, the ones you are most likely to see. I’ll add more over time. The guide is organized much like the Peterson’s Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers; by color, number of petals. These are actual pictures (mine), so are limited, but I think they are more helpful to most people than the line drawings you find in Peterson’s. There is a key to the Vascular Plants of Upper Bidwell Park, by Vern Oswald, which is kind of technical, with no pictures. I’ve used it as a reference for this site, but I’ve always had a hard time navigating it. The bloom dates were taken from this 1986 book, so it would be interesting to see how or if they have changed. The locations are suggestions on where to find the flowers, and by no means comprehensive. One major limitation of Oswald’s book is that the South Rim  from Day Camp east wasn’t part of the Park at the time. I’ve added plants from this area that I have pictures of, but this area needs a lot of work. These aren’t all the flowers, but I’ve tried to note when there are similar species that could complicate things. And, to be sure, with over 750  species of plants in the Upper Park, it does get complicated. If you want more pictures of a flower, go to http://calphotos.berkeley.edu/. You’ll want to search using the scientific name for the flower, as common names often are used for more than one species (hence the need for scientific names!). This is a work in progress, so I welcome comments, pictures, and so on. I volunteer my own time and spend my own money to put this guide on line, so I’ll do what I can in my spare time.

Thanks, and enjoy the flowers!

This website © Jon Aull