A collection of flora from the pacific wonderland.

Sicklepod Rockcress (Arabis sparsiflora)

Dalles Mountain Road, Columbia Gorge, WA, 4/2014.

Dalles Mountain Road, Columbia Gorge, WA, 4/2014.

Many books/botanists now classify this as Boechera sparsiflora.

The common suffix, cress, seems to be a generic term for some edible members of the mustard family (most definitions refer to a pungent taste).  This variety occurs at all elevations, but only east, and south of the Cascades.  Arabis is the Greek word for cress, and also the Greek word for Arabia,  which may allude to the sandy soils the plant can tolerate.  We found it near the top of the Dalles Mountain Road.

Horsethief Butte, Columbia Hills State Park, Columbia Gorge, WA, 4/2014.

Dalles Mountain Road, Columbia Gorge, WA, 4/2014.

This entry was posted on March 15, 2015 by . It was filed under Alpine, East of Cascades, grasslands, Low Elevation, May, Mid Elevation, mustard, purple/blue, rocky slopes, Southern Oregon / Northern California, Washington and was tagged with , , , .

One response

  1. Margaret Lynette Sharp

    Quite pretty 🙂

    March 16, 2015 at 2:44 am

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s