Brodiaea elegans
Mary Sue Ittner (Sat, 18 Jun 2016 18:46:58 PDT)

Hi Travis,

That's a nice photo of the Brodiaea elegans. This species is blooming
for me now too in great abundance after our almost normal rainfall year.
In the drought there were few blooms so it probably either didn't show
up or didn't last long enough to flower. It's not the last to bloom for
me. A form of B. californica blooms later as does B. pallida. Brodiaea
leptandra and B. coronaria bloom about the same time as B. elegans in my
garden. The size of the flowers of these species is variable. Triteleia
peduncularis is a species that can have a lot of flowers, but one year
we discovered one in our area with just a few. There is a great
variation in size of flowers and time of bloom in different locations
for a lot of species in the Brodiaea complex so it is hard to
generalize. On the wiki we have photos of Dichelostemma capitatum in
different counties in California. Photographers didn't note the size of
the flowers so it is impossible to compare the size of the plants in
counties with differences in the amount and timing of rainfall. I saw
some flowering on a recent trip in May, no doubt long after plants in
other parts of the state had dried up and gone to seed.

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

When you grow the plants from seed from different locations, they often
bloom at different times. This has been a fantastic year for Triteleia
laxa, again after fewer flowers in the drought. Our local species has
short small flowers and blooms into summer so it doesn't fit your
hypothesis either. I grow some that are in bloom at the same time that
are much larger. So they have maintained their genetic tendencies when
grown in the same place. And there is a great variation in the shade of
blue as well. For awhile I had some that were really large, but I've
lost them. So that variety must have not liked my conditions. Also one
of the subspecies of Triteleia ixioides that blooms for me the last when
it usually has been dry for some time, months after some of the others,
has the smallest flowers.

It sounds like a good subject for a research paper, what determines the
size of flowers of the same species in different areas.

Mary Sue

On 6/18/2016 5:25 PM, Travis O wrote: