Easily one of the prettiest flowers here, Prickly Saxifrage (Saxifraga tricuspidata) always gets my attention. Small cream coloured flowers with orange spots rise above sharp leaves, often red, that are low to the ground. They tend to be found in drier spots, and one place they abound is on the hills above the inflow of Marcil Lake.
Masses of flowers are found there on the south facing hill, amongst the lichen covered rocks.
Here are a couple of other flowers there. I believe that this is Vahl's Cinquefoil (Potentilla vahliana) but am unsure.
Some waning Arctic Poppies over looking Marcil Lake.
River Beauty, or Dwarf Fireweed (Epilobium latifolium). Hilary had me photographing each bunch for awhile.
Comments
3 responses
What amazes me is how quickly the flowers go through their cycles to produce seed..I have been trying to focus on IDing some arctic flowers on my own blog (btw thanks for listing ) and wondering what these small white flowers are so maybe you have answered..but same size as the purple saxifrage?
I’ve actually been wondering what each of these flowers are called and it’s hard to find much on the web. So thanks for posting this! Can you eat the dwarf Fireweed Clare? I don’t know if you saw Finnskimo’s last post on Fireweed Jelly, but it looks like they have a different type of Fireweed over there..
They have a very short season to set that seed, so they’ve developed a number of strategies to do it Bonnie. Purple Saxifrage, for example, flower buds appear in the fall, so they bloom quickly. Viviporus Knotweed, reproduces asexually as well, having little buds that fall and produce a little clone of the plant. There are a lot of little white flowers so with out picture its tough. The saxifrages all have five petals, ten stamens, and a two part seed capsule formed of divergent horns. The flowers of Prickly Saxifrage are about the same size as purple.
You can eat anything at least once Jen. Dwarf fireweed and regular fireweed are closely related and I’m guessing you could get the same results for the jelly. But it’s just a guess.
The book I use most often to help ID plant (and for a host of other information) is A Naturalists Guide to the Arctic by E.C. Pielou. Illustrations are all line drawings and I rely a lot on the info in the text.