Wiki Additions
Mary Sue Ittner (Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:59:37 PST)

Hi,

I've continued to add some more Australia plant pictures to the wiki.
Arnold has been helping me by starting the pages with text and then I
supplement what he adds when I add the pictures. This first one represents
a tuberous terrestrial orchid called a bird orchid. Will Ashburner found
these for us in the fading light when we were hiking a trail in a park he
took us to near where he lives. It wasn't light enough to see the plants
well enough to focus on them so we used an automatic focus and a flash and
pointed our cameras where we thought they were and hoped for the best.

http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

Another group of tuberous orchids usually only open in the sunshine on warm
days (like a lot of South African irids) and are therefore known as sun
orchids. They are a very colorful group of plants and we were always
thrilled when we discovered any, even some of them that were not very tall
and had small flowers. I hope I have them identified correctly. Any
Australian members of our list please let me know if you think I need to
correct any names. I spent quite a lot of time pouring over my pictures and
books, but there are so many species and I don't have descriptions or
pictures of all of them.

http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

Another genus in the Colchicum family with just a few species is
Burchardia. It looks like this one has had some taxonomic changes in the
last few years as there appears to be an Australia taxonomist who is
looking at the Western Australian species that were thought to be the same
as some of the Eastern species and separating them out. When we were out
plant exploring I assumed they were all the same species since they look
much the same.

http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

Finally I wanted to add a picture of a Brunsvigia now blooming in my garden
(seems like a strange time to be doing so) I grew from seed, Brunsvigia
grandiflora. I love the leaves on this one as the last two years they have
been twisted. I hope they stay that way as they weren't like that when they
were young. I realized I had a number of Brunsvigia pictures I had planned
to add and never gotten around to adding so did it all at once. There are
leaf pictures from the Karoo Desert National Botanical garden in Worcester
taken more than a year ago when we visited, B. marginata which bloomed
last year, but not this year, habitat pictures of a number of Eastern Cape
species from Cameron McMaster and a Namaqualand species from Alan
Horstmann. Jay Yourch has been refining the thumbnails so that when pages
are changed they are now more proportionate to the actual picture. You'll
be able to see this on this page.
http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…

Mary Sue