Blog news

Remember that for the past month or so I've been working on making a Brewster County photo guide to help my sister and me identify plants at our places? Well, today I googled a species name to find a photo of it to add to the guide. The only photo that came up was one from this blog site. I had long forgotten I'd ever posted it, or even what the plant was, etc. But that gave me an inspiration. I decided to make a plant blog and post a photo of every species that we've photographed on our land. That way when other researchers are googling for a plant they can see a photo of ours and where it was taken (Christmas Mountains).

As I was setting up the blog I saw an option to put a search window on it. I don't remember why there wasn't one on this [CMO] blog, but I immediately remedied that. Now you can search any subject and if it's ever mentioned on my blog it'll come up. I had previously been using the search window on the blog's dashboard, but was wishing everyone could have that tool. So try it out. It's in the upper right-hand corner. And the link to the new plant blog is on the lower right-hand corner. But it's still a work in progress. You can see what I've done so far but it'll be several more days, or weeks, before I get all our species on there.

Another good thing about the new blog is that it'll inspire me to take better photos of each species to replace the current ones. And when we find a new species I'll add it to the blog on the page for it's plant family. Since we have photos from about 70 plant families, it'll take me awhile to finish. It'll appear as a blog with that number of posts, unlike this CMO blog that is more of a journal with an additional post for every time I blog.... now nearing the two thousand mark. In the plant blog I'll just update the 70 posts. Unless we get a photo from a plant family that we didn't have one from before. Then I'll add a new post.

Here is the photo that inspired me. Just an innocent photo of a Gregg's Poreleaf (Porophyllum greggii), perhaps not very common, since Powell says that it "has been rarely collected." Which I guess is why only my photo of one came up in my google search. A couple other porophyllum photos came up, but I couldn't use them as they didn't say which porophyllum species they were.

On my post that March day in 2017, I mentioned that I was excitedly waiting for it to bloom. I have no memory of that at all. My blog serves as my memory. It had been ID'd for me by Patrick Alexander, a plant expert. Apparently, I forgot to get another photo when it bloomed. I hope to have lots of time and energy next spring to take lots of plant photos.

BTW, I have a butterfly blog too but I just add a photo when I get a better one, or get a new species. It's organized a little differently than the plant blog since there are way more plants species than butterfly species. But, of course, all my blogs are works in progress.