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The Bridgeport section of the South Yuba River State Park ranges in elevation from about 600 to 1000 feet and includes four designated trails: Buttermilk Bend, Point Defiance Loop, Kneebone Beach, and Cemetery-Kentucky Creek. An April 2002 combined list by Chet Blackburn, Mary Miller, Marya Miller (docents) and Karen Callahan of the Redbud Chapter of the California Native Plant Society identifies 220 flowering plants on these trails. This is a reasonably digestible list compared with the approximately 30,000 flowing plants cataloged by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The local scope (and hence small number) of Bridgeport flowering plants has allowed docents to post photo placards that identify plants on the Buttermilk Bend trail. Typically, placards are placed for less than half these 220 identified plants, but those posted include the most frequently seen by visitors and the ones which contribute most of the spectacular display of Spring wildflowers. The web pages here include descriptions and photos for 89 Bridgeport wildflowers, which includes nearly all of the placard-identified plants. The table below lists these 89 in the same order as in the free Wildflower Committee legal-size-folded pamphlet, and in turn in the full-color booklet available in the Visitor Center and in a similar nine-page letter-size version here. The flower images in the printable Internet version are 200 pixels wide, large enough to see the flowers but not with much detail and with none of the descriptive material in the free pamphlet. Larger images (nominally 800 pixels wide and/or 600 pixels tall) plus descriptive material are linked from the table below, which again follows the Wildflower Committee listing scheme. Full-screen, high definition images in a video zoom and pan format are presented in a 13-minute movie with music by Debussy and Mozart. To see the 800-pixel-image pages, click on the entries in the Photo column. In addition to photos and plant descriptions, these pages include the complete classification, from Kingdom (plant) to Species, taken from the USDA PLANTS website (a few Bridgeport plants are not listed by USDA). In the classification list for each plant you can click on the species name to jump to the USDA site opened to that plant and delve much deeper into the plant's description, including a direct link to CalPhotos for that plant. Further information can be found by electronically copying the botanical name (highlight the name and then press ctrl and "c" at the same time) and pasting it (ctrl "v") into a Google search. Finally, you can jump directly to the Jepson Manual treatment for each plant by clicking on the Botanical Name in the table below. This gives the characteristics of the family, genus, and species, and a map of where the plant is found in California. Many will prefer to start from thumbnail pictures of the plants rather than simply their names in the following list. Then you can go to details about a flower of interest by clicking on its thumnail. This has the disadvantage that scrolling through even small thumbnails for 89 plants is a bit clumsy. However, you should be able to jump to the 12-thumbnail groups containing your flowers of interest by noting that the thumbnails are given in the same order as in the list below, which is much faster to scroll. This allows you, for example, to jump immediately to thumbnails for your flower color of interest. The thumbnail page number on which each flower falls is given after the botanical name in the list below. The first of each page number in the botanical name column is a link to that thumbnail page. Or you can simply start at the first page of thumbnails (which is numbered 2 because it is the second printed page for a booklet), and jump to any of the others via a complete set of page links at the bottom of every page. The photographs are largely by Herb Lindberg (HL), but the associations between the photographs and the flower names, and their descriptions, is entirely by the SYRPA Wildflower Committee. For the most part, the descriptions were copied from the notes they use on wildflower walks, and then edited to give a consistent format here. |