The View from the Back
by Cathy Jefferies
For all of us who either haven't found the perfect bike of our own, or who don't really have
much interest in riding on the front of a motorcycle, spring is a terrific time to sit on the back and
enjoy the scenery. Especially if you decide to take up the sport of high-speed botany.
With a little practice, you can identify many kinds of flowers while moving along at
respectable touring speeds. On the April tour to Petrolia, I spotted California poppy, several kinds of
lupine, crimson columbine, Indian paintbrush, redbud, dogwood, wild iris, a couple types of brodiaea,
wild cucumber, owl's clover, Indian warrior, fiddlenecks, flowering currant, Scotch broom, ceanothus,
mule's ears, larkspur, wallflower, mustard and wild radish, among others.
In high-speed botany, the characteristics of color, size, and shape (both of the individual
flowers and their arrangement on the stalk) come together to form an overall quality I call "texture".
Once you've got the texture of a particular flower in your mind's eye, even the briefest glimpse can be
enough to allow you to recognize it.
To show how to use the characteristics of color, size and shape in high-speed botany, let's
look at a flower most of you should be familiar with, the California poppy. You can probably already
spot a poppy as you fly by, just by its bright orange color. But compare the poppy to the similarly
colored wallflower. Subtle differences in color are important in high-speed botany -- the orange of the
wallflower is slightly more yellowish than the poppy's -- but even without knowing that, you're still not
likely to mistake one for the other. Poppies have four fairly large petals, and grow one flower on a
stem, although you will often see a bouquet of flowers on a single plant. Wallflowers have four petals
too, but rather than overlapping like those of the poppy, they are separated to form the shape of a
cross. (In fact, wallflowers are members of the family known as Cruciferae.) The individual
wallflowers are much smaller than poppies, and a single stalk will have a dome-shaped cluster of
several blossoms. (Look for wallflowers on rocky road cuts.)
The way to begin identifying flowers at high speed is to become familiar with them up close
and stationary first. Because of the importance of subtle color differences in high-speed identification,
a field guide with good color photographs may be more useful than one with line drawings. But even
better than just looking at books is spending some time hiking around your favorite regional park or
natural area getting to know the flowers. Once you have several flowers that you can recognize when
you are out walking, then it's time to try from the back of the bike.
Being a passenger on a motorcycle may not have the physical challenge of being a rider, but
it does offer an opportunity to expand your awareness of the world around you, even if you are moving
too fast to stop and smell the flowers.
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