A new gallery!

[swan_tower]

My recent trip to Yosemite netted me enough good photos that I’ve broken all my shots of the park out of the California gallery and into one of their own. Before, there were two; now there are eighteen! I’ve also added three Yosemite photos to the flower gallery. (I . . . think the thing you see in two of them is a flower? It may be a fungus. I’m not exactly a forest ranger.)

As usual, if you’d like to purchase prints (on any medium: paper, wood, glass, acrylic, metal, and more) or license any of the images for use in book covers etc., drop me a line!

Comments

[threeringedmoon]

I love this shot of Yosemite.

[swan_tower]

Pre-sunset light does beautiful things.

[pameladean]

I'm not a forest ranger either, but I'm pretty sure that red plant is sarcodes sanguinea, or snow plant. It's parasitic on the mycorrhizal fungi attached to tree roots. The ones in the photos seem to be just emerging, so they'll have flowers later but they aren't flowers now. If you don't have a Weird Plants section I don't see why the photos shouldn't stay where they are, though.

I can't look away from those photos. Those plants are doing a perfectly reasonable thing to survive in their environment; but they are both really pretty and SO WRONG.

P.

[swan_tower]

A quick search tells me you're exactly right on the ID! And yes, don't they look alien? Most non-flower things are somewhere on the brown-to-green spectrum, so having something BRIGHT RED that isn't a flower is weeeeeeeird.

[pameladean]

The effect must have been even more striking seeing them in person! I've never actually seen them, but they are referred or linked to if you're looking up something like coralroot orchids, which we do have in Minnesota. Those are fairly alien-looking themselves, but seem quite ordinary next to the snow plant.

P.