Wildflowers of McLaren Park: Iris douglasiana

My neighbor—who is also my friend—and I end up on lots of walks together. Like me, she loves plants. She's currently taking a plant ID course at City College, and oftentimes our walks become practice for class. While I'm okay at Latin names, she's quickly overtaking my skill set. But even when we aren't tossing Latin names around, we are enjoying what we see, and both of us have walked all the trails of the park enough that we know where our favorite treasures are.

Both of us have separately noticed and together celebrated a large clump of Pacific iris, Iris douglasiana, not too far off a trail in a dip that fills slightly with rainwater in the winter but is otherwise bone dry. It's a healthy grouping, currently loaded with flowers, and it's been there for years.

In our neighborhood, the native iris is pale lavender with deep purple stripes and yellow patches on the falls, but in other places, the iris can be deep purple, or periwinkle with more defined yellow blotches, white with pale pinstripes as it appears in the hills around Calistoga, or even pure yellow.

The blooms don't last long, and the crystalline beauty of each is hard to capture in a photo, but they are welcome gifts each spring, and they settle this corner of San Francisco deeply into its wild past. They live here perhaps because the native elk that lived once here had better things to eat, and the imported cattle that used to roam these hills found them bitter. 

My plant-loving friend is out of town, so Georgia and I walked alone today to go see the iris. We bushwhacked just to be close and give them a good look. Unlike the Viola pedunculata that I recently wrote about, I don't know what this iris feeds other than slugs and snails. I don't know if it provides a tenuous lifeline to a near-extinct species. But, both Georgia and I agree that it is beautiful, and we were happy today to spend some time in its presence.