Botanical Adventures......which took me all over the West for many years...
I spent a lot of years chasing plants, but the most exciting were while I was doing my thesis research. I began by looking for new populations of Mentzelia mollis, a scruffy little plant with large, pretty yellow flowers, which had only been collected from a few sites in SW Idaho and SE Oregon.
Before I was done, I'd found a bunch more, as well as a brand new Mentzelia, which I named after Dr. Particia Packard, my mentor and my inspiration. It's pretty rare, occurring only in the SE corner of Oregon and a few sites in northern Nevada.
A lot of that research was looking at specimens of Mentzelia collected by other botanists (more than 1,500, before I was finished) and deciding exactly which Mentzelia each was. A "specimen", in case you're wondering, is a flattened, dried plant glued to a large sheet of paper and stored in a tall, fireproof cabinet at an academic or archival institution.
I borrowed specimens from all over, and got an interesting assortment of Mentzelias, including some almost-twins of Mentzelia mollis from Colorado. The only obvious difference was that the Colorado plants had tiny flowers. Three months later, after many, many hours peering through microscopes, I concluded that I had two new species, one from Leslie Gulch in Oregon, one from the mountains that form the border between Colorado and Utah (Confession: I've never actually been to those mountains. Such is sometimes the nature of scientific research.)
In order for a new plant species to be recognized, it must be described in a botanical journal, so I set about writing up first my thesis, and then a paper derived from it. Almost two years later "Taxonomy of Mentzelia mollis and Allied Species (Loasaceae)" was published in MADROÑO.
I didn't stay in academia, but I did continue in botany, spending the next 20 years as a consultant, working all over the western United State and even on a couple of projects in Canada. Those were exciting, rewarding, sometimes exhausting times, but nothing I ever did professionally compares with the discovery of those two new Mentzelias.
Three Mentzelias
Packard's mentzelia
Mentzelia packardiae Glad (Loasaceae):
Malheur County, Oregon; in green rocky soil derived from the Succor Creek formation.
Photos, and the original publication.
Also see Wikipedia. More photos here, and here.
Drawing © Judith B. Glad; photograph © 2012 Oregon Dept. Agriculture)
Mentzelia mollis Peck (Loasaceae):
found in southwestern Idaho and southeastern Oregon, on tuffaceous ash derived from the Succor Creek formation.
.More about Mentzelia mollis
Smooth mentzelia
Thompson's stickleaf
Mentzelia thompsonii Glad (Loasaceae):
found on gray clay of high desert hills along the Utah-Colorado border.
In the field it might be mistaken for Mentzelia mollis, except it has tiny flowers, and doesn't grow in Oregon.
And a Search for Sidalcea...
For more than ten years a colleague and I ranged all over the Willamette Valley and the east slopes of the Coast Range--and even ventured a little ways into Washington--looking for a hollyhock-cousin that might or not be rare. We found a number of populations, and more have been located by others since. In 2022 it was considered abundant enough that it was removed from the list of Rare and Endangered plants.
Nelson's checkermallow
Sidalcea nelsoniana Piper (Malvaceae):
found in the Willamette Valley and Coast Range in Oregon, extending a little ways northward into the Puget Trough and Coast Range in Washington. It mostly grows in roadside ditches, abandoned fields and pastures, and along the occasional ditchbank.
Here's what Wikipedia says about it.