Glossary

Two terms frequently referred to in this web site are placed at the top
of this glossary page for quick reference.

Scientific Name: A Latin and/or Greek name assigned by botanists to plants and accepted internationally. The name describes a plant's characteristics, or honors a person with part of that person's name, or commemorates the place the plant was first found, or describes a relation between the plant and another plant, etc. See Family, Genus and Species.

See Plant Names for a discussion of why we should use scientific instead of common names, how scientific names are arrived at, a brief history of the development of scientific names, and why scientific names change. Very interesting.

Synonym: In botany a synonym is a scientific name which at one time was given to a plant but is now no longer considered to be the proper name for that plant -- at least it is no longer considered to be the proper name by the authority writing the particular plant book (or web site) you are using.

Scientific names in a book or web site must be consistent, i.e., they must follow some authority's nomenclature. The first scientific plant name given for each plant on this web site is that designated by THE Colorado plant authority, William Weber, in his third edition of Colorado Flora, Western Slope. Weber believes in making individual species, genera, and families as distinct from one another as possible, and you will, therefore, find some new species, genera, and family names in this web site. Some of these new names are accepted by all plant authorities; some are considered synonyms.

Since some of Weber's plant names are controversial, I have consulted several other national authorities to try to determine the currently accepted name. The scientific name shown in bold on each enlarged photo page is the currently accepted name according to John Kartesz's Synthesis of the North American Flora. Scientific names shown in normal font are synonyms. In the vast majority of cases, the name given by Weber and the name given by Kartesz are the same.

More information about synonyms can be found in the Plant Names section of this web site.

Alpine: Above 11,500 feet (tree line). Characterized by tundra: land of thin soil, rocks, a very short growing season, and frost any day of the year. Annually 30-55 inches of moisture, most from snow. Magnificent carpets of dwarfed flowering plants in July and August.

Annual: A plant which completes its entire life cycle of root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed in just one year and then dies. See Biennial and Perennial.

Anthesis: Botanical term for "flowering time", e.g., "The plant has no basal leaves at anthesis".

Areole: Found only on Cactus, this organ gives rise to spines, flowers, stems, or roots.

Banner: The topmost, large, upright flower petal in plants of the Pea Family. The "wings", which enclose the "keel", extend outward from the bottom of the banner.

Biennial: A plant which lives two years, producing a basal rosette of leaves the first year and a full plant, flower, and seed the second year followed by death of the entire plant at the end of the second year. See Annual and Perennial.

Bract: A modified leaf that encases and then subtends the flower after the flower opens. All of the bracts that subtend a flower are together called the "involucre". (In the Asteraceae family, the bracts are called "phyllaries".)

Calyx: The outer segment of a flower that encases and then surrounds the petals. The individual parts of the calyx are called sepals.

Canescent: Coated so extensively with hairs that as to have a gray/white cast.

Canyons: Deep and long depressions with walls of cliffs and slopes. Pinyon Pine, Juniper, Sagebrush are common. The Four Corners area is rich in deep, long, and beautiful red and white sandstone rock canyons.

Carpel: A flower's female reproductive organ, consisting of the stigma, style, and ovary and made of an inrolled leaf. The peapod is an example. Many flowers have more than one carpel and the carpels collectively are called the gynoecium. See pistillate, stamen, staminate.

Ciliate: Fringed on the margins with hairs. These hairs, usually on the edges of leaves, are sometimes one of the keys to distinguishing between species. Usually the cilia can best be seen with a 10x hand lens. See Monardella odoratissima and Asters.

Cladistics: A widely accepted recent phylogenetic method for classifying. It makes assumptions about the primitiveness of a group of plants' characteristics and represents these in a branching diagram (a cladogram). Other cladograms are drawn based on other assumptions about primitiveness of characteristics. Through the process of: "if this, then this, but not that" and by working with probability theories, it is believed that cladistics will lead to an understanding of which characteristics are most primitive and which evolved. It is believed that cladistics will produce a more accurate classification of plants.

Common Name: A name given to a plant by anyone in any language for any reason.

See Plant Names for a discussion of why we should use scientific, not common names, how scientific names are arrived at, a brief history of the development of scientific names, why scientific names change, etc. Very interesting.

Corymb: A type of spreading inflorescence in which each flower stem ("pedicel") originates from a different point on the main flower stem producing a flat-topped flower cluster. Umbels, another type of inflorescence, have pedicels which originate from the same point, as umbrella spokes do, and produce a rounded-top flower cluster.

Cyme: An inflorescence in which a single, but branched, flower stalk emerges at the top of the main flower stalk. The lower flower stalks emerge opposite each other off the main flower stalk and bloom after the topmost flowers. In "racemes" the first blooming flowers are at the bottom of the flower stalk. In cyme inflorescences the first flowers are often at the top.

Descriptions, Botanical: The formal, detailed write-up of a plant's characteristics following an accepted pattern of analysis and descriptive format. The plant's presently accepted name and the botanist who named it comes first. These are followed by past names ("synonyms"); perhaps a common name; a generalized overview of the plant including whether it is perennial, annual, etc.; then the details of the plant's morphology starting with the roots, stems, and leaves, then the flower in considerable detail, then the fruit, chromosomes, and finally notes on habitat, similar species, other botanist's agreements/disagreements with the descriptive notes, etc.

Most plants are inadvertently described more than once, perhaps many times, each time by a different botanist. Each description may result in a different scientific name until someone examines all the specimens and determines which are the same species and which name takes precedence, the latter according to the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, the latest version known as the "2005 Vienna Code" (not yet available on-line, but click to see the 1999 St. Louis Code.) See Scientific Names and Plant Names.

Dioecious: (Pronounced, die e cious -- rhymes with "delicious") A dioecious species bears its male (staminate) flowers on one plant and female (carpellate) flowers on another. The Greek "dioecious" means "two houses". See Monoecious.

Disk (and Ray) Flowers: What we perceive as flowers in Asteraceae (the Sunflower Family) are actually a myriad of tiny flowers, each of which matures into a seed -- a "sunflower seed". Most Asteraceae flower heads are composed of two entirely different looking flowers: central disk flowers (quite tiny, thin, vertical, often hairy, and tightly packed) and circumferential ray flowers (each having one long, narrow, arched petal which is one of the outer layer of petals so characteristic of sunflowers). Some Asteraceae, however, are composed only of ray flowers, some only of disk flowers.

Drought: Precipitation in the Four Corners area averages from 6 to 15 inches per year in the elevations of 5,000 to 7,000 feet and increases dramatically up to the high montane areas that receive around 300 inches of snow per year and another 20 inches of rain. But precipitation is highly erratic; few months or years are "average" and, in fact, some months or even years are considerably wetter or drier than average. The "average" precipitation is not the "usual" precipitation.

Plants of the Southwest are comfortable with these variations; they have evolved in and continue to thrive in these erratic conditions. Human beings are not comfortable with varying precipitation levels; they want a consistent water supply for boating on their reservoirs and watering their lawns and golf courses.

Drought is made harsher by three factors: hard freezes in June and high winds and above normal temperatures which evaporate snow from the mountains and water from reservoirs.

Less snow means less water in the rivers, which means less water in the river-fed reservoirs. There will then be less irrigation water, fewer crops to feed the cattle, less cattle money for purchases at local businesses, less tax money collected and thus less money for road repairs, schools, health care, golf courses. We have tried to build a watered way of life for too many people in the erratically dry Southwest.

Wild animals, too, can be caught in a negative chain of events: a freeze in June means that many Oaks will have their leaves and flowers frozen. The acorn crop, which many wild creatures depend on, will be sharply reduced.

Flowers, and sometimes even plants, will be confined to little rivulets of water across meadows, in seeps, etc. Low desert areas may have very few flowers.

Those plants that do flower will produce seeds that have a better chance of surviving dry conditions. Evolution continues.

Family: A large grouping of plants with shared characteristics. Often these characteristics are visually apparent to the unaided eye: the green, slender, long and narrow-leaved upright structure of grasses; the wide, flattened disc usually fringed by numerous, long, thin petals flared outwards of the Sunflowers; the cross-shaped four-petaled flowers of the Mustards; the umbrella-like flower structure of the Parsleys; the long thin needle leaves of Conifers.

Learning such key characteristics of just 19 families will, as William A. Weber, master of Colorado plants, points out in his Colorado Flora, Western Slope, assist in identifying over 75% of the plants in our area. For example, the Western slope of the Colorado Rockies has over 2,100 species in 139 families, but Weber indicates that almost 1600 species are in those 19 families. The top six families are: Asteraceae (Sunflower) with 354 species, Poaceae (Grasses) 208, Fabaceae (Pea) 138, Cyperaceae (Sedges) 123, Brassicaceae (Mustards) 119, and Scrophulariaceae (Snapdragon) 99. See Genus, Species, Scientific Name, and Plant Names.

Scientific names shown in bold on the enlarged photo pages are the currently accepted names according to John Kartesz's Synthesis of the North American Flora. Scientific names shown in normal font are, in the Synthesis, synonyms. The first name shown in every entry is that accepted by William Weber.

Flower: 1) The reproductive portion of some plants, consisting of either pistils or stamens or both and usually including sepals and petals. Because a plant has flowers it does not necessarily follow that the plant reproduces itself exclusively by the ripened ovary of this flower. Some plants propagate more from underground root spread or from plant parts that fall to the ground and root. And plants such as ferns do not flower but instead have spores, reproductive cells that can give rise to a new plant.

2) Some plants have a very short flowering period, others bloom the entire summer. Some plants put out a single flower, others have numerous flowers, either over a long period of time or within a few days. Some individual flowers last part of a day; others for many days. Some flowers open early in the day, some in the heat of the day, others at night.

Foothills: From 6,500 to 8,000 feet. Pinyon Pine, Juniper, and Oak forests, often quite thick. Pockets of Douglas Firs. Ponderosa Pine at higher elevations. Numerous shrubs: Serviceberry, Mountain Mahogany, Snowberry. Annually about 14-25 inches of moisture, about half from snow. Moderate wildflower growth in May and June.

Four Corners: The area covered in this web site extends in a hundred and fifty mile radius from the Four Corners, the meeting point of the borders of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. This area is part of the larger Colorado Plateau: the mountains, mesas, canyons, and semi-desert lands which drain into the Colorado River.

Gall: An abnormal bulbous formation on plant leaves or stems. It is a plant's attempt to protect itself from an unusual occurrence, usually a mass of insect eggs being deposited on its surface. Cells multiply rapidly to isolate the foreign substance, but this at the same time provides shelter for the substance. The plant suffers little damage from the insects or the gall. Picture of gall.

Genus: A subdivision of the Family in which all members have a significant number of similar (or identical) characteristics. With practice an amateur can often determine the genus without recourse to detailed botanical texts and a magnifying glass. The genus name is capitalized and accompanied by and followed by the specific name; both are italicized, for example, Rosea woodsii. Rosea is the genus and woodsii is the specific name (also called the specific epithet).

Glabrous: Smooth, without hairs. Whether a twig, stem, or leaf is glabrous or pubescent often is important in distinguishing between species, but the amount of hairiness often varies with the age of the plant. See pubescent.

Habitat: As used in this web site, "habitat" refers to the environmental components (rocks, wetlands, woodlands, etc.) in which a plant best survives.

Herb or Herbaceous: A plant whose stems die back to the ground in the winter. See Woody.

Monocarpic: A monocarpic plant is one which grows for a number of years until it flowers for the first and only time, fruits, and dies. The Century Plant is monocarpic. See Frasera speciosa and Pterogonum alatum for examples of two fascinating monocarpic plants in the Four Corners.

Monoecious: (Pronounced, mo knee cious -- rhymes with "delicious") A monoecious species bears its male (staminate) flowers and its female (carpellate) flowers on the same plant and thus all plants can bear fruit. The Greek "monoecious" means "one house". See Dioecious.

Montane: From 8,000 to 10,000 feet. Open Aspen forests, sometimes with heavy undergrowth of shrubs (Snowberry, Currants, Elderberry). Colorado Blue Spruce in moist areas. At lower elevations some large stands of Ponderosa Pine with scattered Douglas Fir on north facing slopes. Annually about 18-30 inches of moisture 1/2 to 3/4 from snow. Moderate to lush wildflower growth from June-August.

Noxious Weed: Often this term is used in a very specific legal manner to describe a plant which has been introduced to a location, is a non-native plant, and which often crowds out native species or species of economic value. See the full page discussion of the noxious weed problem.

Panicle: A type of inflorescence in which the main flower stalk is branched a number of times into more flower stalks, i.e., it is a branched raceme. Each flower is attached to its stalk by a stem, a "pedicel".

Pappus: Small scales, bristles, or, very often, silvery hairs at the apex of the seed in Asteraceae species. The texture, number, and shape of the pappus are key in distinguishing between Asteraceae species. See the Arnica page for photos of pappus and also see Taraxacum officinale, Dandelions, and Senecio spartioides for a view of pappus hairs that we all know.

Parasitic: A plant that lives off the live tissue of other plants. See saprophytic.

Pedicel: The stem of a flower. A number of flowers have no stem; they are "sessile".

Phylogenetics: The system of plant classification that tries to reflect evolution. Phylogenetics arose after Darwin at the beginning of the 20th century and is still evolving as it searches for a basis for ordering plants in their evolutionary sequence. Early phylogenetic systems started with basic assumptions about which features of plants were most primitive and which were derived, evolved, characteristics. Recent classification tries to base the ordering of plants on scientifically verifiable, rather than on subjective assumptions, about primitive versus evolved traits. See cladistics.

Pinnate: Latin "pinnat" means "feathered". The term is used to describe leaves that have a primary central axis from which subdivisions branch off, usually nearly perpendicularly. Many plants have pinnate leaves: Mimosas, Ashes, Peas.

Pubescent: Hairy. Pubescence is a distinguishing factor in plant identification. Pubescence varies from leaf to twig to stem and with the age of the plant. See glabrous.

Raceme: An elongated type of inflorescence with individual flowers attached to a central stalk by a flower stem (a pedicel). See Actaea rubra for an example of a raceme.

A raceme flower arrangement also can refer to the general habit of flowers blooming first at the bottom of the stalk. Racemes, spikes, umbels, and corymbs flower from the bottom up. Cyme flower arrangements bloom first at the top of the stalk.

Rhizomatous: Arising from horizontal underground root-like structures (rhizomes) that sprout new plants from their nodes.

Scientific Name: A Latin name assigned by botanists to plants and accepted internationally. See Genus, Species.

See Plant Names for a discussion of why we should use scientific not common names, how scientific names are arrived at, a brief history of the development of scientific names, and why scientific names change. Very interesting.

Scree: Fields (often extensive) of small (often one or two feet on a side and an inch to a foot thick), loose, slab rock. Such loose rock fields are very common above 11,000 feet in the San Juans. Larger boulder fields are called "talus" but the two terms grade into each other.

Semi-deserts: From 5,000 to 6,500 feet. Arid. Annually 7-14 inches of moisture, 1/4 or less from snow. Semi-desert areas are characterized by open, sandy flats with scattered shrubs (Saltbush, Sagebrush) and Cottonwoods along washes. Higher semi-desert canyons have Pinyon Pine, Juniper, and Oak with some thick patches of Sagebrush, Yucca, Mountain Mahogany, and other shrubs. Wildflower growth is best from March to June but is highly dependent on winter moisture.

Sepals: Floral parts that enclose the petals and then surround them after the flower opens. Taken collectively, the sepals are called the "calyx". Petals may actually curve back through the sepals and alternate with them. See, for instance, Mitella stauropetala and Ceanothus fendleri. Sepals can be quite attractive and a key visual element of the flower, as they are in the Colorado state flower, Aquilegia coerulea, Columbine. A flower's sepals are collectively called the "calyx".

Sessile: Lacking a stem. Flowers and leaves can be attached to their main stalk with or without a stem.

Shrublands: Arid lands characterized by shrubs, grasses, and a lack of trees.

Sp: Abbreviation for "specie". (Plural is "spp".) An "sp" following the genus name in this web site indicates that the exact species was not determined in the field and cannot be determined from the photograph.

Species: A subdivision of the genus that has just one plant (or very, very closely related plants, i.e., subspecies, varieties, or forms of a species). A species has enough unique characteristics that it can be differentiated from all other plants. Members of a species do not pollinate members of other species. Intermountain Flora indicates:

"A typical species is separated from other species by an absolute or nearly absolute gap in the variability, and by a complete or nearly complete barrier to interbreeding."

The scientific name for a plant, i.e., the name of the species, is always two-part, two words. The first word designates the genus to which the plant belongs and the second word, called the "specific epithet" (or "species epithet"), gives a name to distinguish this plant from all others in the same genus. For example, in the name Senecio serra, "Senecio" is the genus and "serra" is the specific epithet. There are many other Senecios but only one Senecio serra.

Both the genus and the specific epithet are italicized; the genus is capitalized and the specific epithet is lower case.

Identifying the species is more complicated than identifying the family or genus and often cannot be done without examining the entire plant, sometimes throughout the growing, flowering, and seeding seasons and utilizing a magnifying glass and detailed botanical texts.

Scientific names shown in bold on the enlarged photo pages are the currently accepted names according to John Kartesz's Synthesis of the North American Flora (available in early 2008). Scientific names shown in normal font are synonyms.

Specific epithet: Scientific names consist of two parts, the genus and the specific epithet. In the name, "Geranium richardsonii", "Geranium" is the genus and "richardsonii" is the specific epithet. Frequently the specific epithet is incorrectly called the "species", i.e., it is incorrect to say that "richardsonii" is the "species". The species is Geranium richardsonii.

Spike: An elongated type of inflorescence in which each flower is sessile, i.e., attached to the stem directly without a stem (a "pedicel"). See Elephant Heads for an example of a spike.

Subalpine: From 10,000 to 11,500 feet. Characterized by thick Spruce/Fir forests; Aspens grow at lower elevations in this zone. Annually about 25-40 inches of moisture, most from snow (about 250-350 inches). Lush wildflower growth mid-June through August.

Taxonomy: The arrangement of plants and animals according to established criteria.

Tepal: The name given to one of the petal-like structures of a flower when there are not both sepals and petals.

Tundra: Land above tree line characterized by a short growing season, intense sun and wind, thin soils, very high snow fall and high rain fall, and low growing sedges, grasses, dwarf shrubs, and herbs.

Type or Type Specimen: The first plant of its kind collected for science, submitted for classification purposes, and stored in an herbarium.

There are various kinds of types: The "holotype" is the one specimen that the first description and name are based on. An "isotype" is a specimen collected at the same time as the holotype by the same person. A "lectotype" is a specimen later designated as the type specimen when no holotype was originally designated.

Type Locality: Refers to the location from which the type specimen came. See "Type or Type Specimen or Holotype" immediately above.

Umbel: A type of inflorescence in which each pedicel, i.e., each flower stalk, grows upward and outward from one point in the same manner the spokes of an umbrella spread upward and outward from the umbrella main stem. The resultant flower cluster has a rounded top versus corymbs which have a flattened top. See the Apiaceae Family (formerly the Umbelliferae Family) for examples. Cow Parsnip and Loveroot.

Compound umbels start with the pedicels originating from the same point and then branching again before a flower grows at the tip of each branching.

Corymb inflorescences are very similar to umbels but their pedicels do not originate from the same point on the main stem.

Vegetation Zone: As used in this web site, "vegetation zone" refers to those altitudes in which a plant best survives.

Woody: A plant whose stems do not die back to the ground in winter. Stems become increasingly large and stiff with added years of growth. The woody accumulation provides strength, protection for vital plant parts, and increased leaf production. The latter ability allows for increased oxygen production and thus our existence. Knock on wood! See Herb.