Sunday, August 03, 2008

Monterey Day

Last week my mom and I went down to Monterey to hang out. She hadn't seen the Brandt's Cormorants before and back in May I had.
Monday (the day we went) we saw lots of wildlife. More than I remembered from May. First was the harbor seals - they weren't there in May, then we noticed the brown pelicans and they were hanging out with a few Cormorants, and then after we walked over to the Coast Guard Pier where the Cormorants nesting site is, we noticed some smaller shorebirds never before noted by my mom - or myself if I kept track ;)

I'll post the wildlife in a subsequent post, but for now, here's some of the plant life we saw.

Rockrose - one of the Cistus species, but because I didn't get a good picture of the leaf structure and the overall plant, I couldn't identify which one.
cistus 01
Tree Mallow (Lavatera maritima) with Fleabane (again, which one, i don't know). The tree mallow I had originally guessed it was some kind of hibiscus - it certainly had the flowers for it. I think they are closely related, but specifically -although it is really a shrub, it's called Tree Mallow.
lavatera_maritima 04
The water drops were likely from watering. There was no rain, but the marine layer was thick enough to leave mist on the windshield, so it might have been from that too.
A Matilija Poppy (Romneya coulteri) whose blooms were 5 or so inches across. Bees like the yellow globe in the middle.
matilija_poppy 03
Sea Lavender (Limonium perezii) - dime a dozen around here, but still beautiful. They make excellent cut flowers because they last forever - even when the water dries up... also make great dried flower arrangements.
statice 03
Here's a closeup of the blooms.
statice 07

There were of course more flowers, but these ones were in great shape and at their peak of blooming.

5 comments:

Mary said...

Red, my gosh. Your flower photos rock. Gorgeous!

I might add I've never seen a Brandt's Cormorant. Lucky you.

Mary

Heidi said...

Thank you very much Mary!

Mary C said...

Very nice post, Red. Now that you have posted your flowers, it's time I post mine and link it to yours.

Leedra said...

You take excellent photos. Why do you only show one post? I am still on that ugly word 'dialup' and I can do other things while the page loads, but limits me to only look at your one post, because I cannot do multiple loads for each blog when I visit them. Also, if the photo has already loaded on my computer it loads on up. I would love to see more of your post, but due to time limits I will view your latest.

Heidi said...

Hi Leedra! Wow, funny coincidence :) My mom just told me about your blog and photos last night. I was planning on visiting you today!

About the one post, I'm not sure, maybe it's a factor with the dialup (ouch!) because my blog is pretty graphic intensive. When I go to the main page I see the last 5 posts.

A minute ago, I just changed my site feed to show the entire post rather than a summary, so maybe if you were to view my page through google reader or another reader, you could view more at once. This is the feed address: http://mmatm.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Just copy and paste that into your reader... or if you can see at the bottom of my sidebar I have a "subscribe to" drop down button.

Thanks so much for the feedback as well as the compliment!

 

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