Lower Table Rock WW 4-4-25

Photos by Eva, Kay and Steve

Ashland Hiking Home

Eleven of us enjoyed a gorgeous day on Lower Table Rock.  As you may know, LTR is such a special spot because it contains 5 different habitats within a very short distance: seasonal wet grasslands, buckbrush chaparral, oak savannah, madrone forest, and of course, the volcanic mounded prairie where rare and unique plants (dwarf wooly meadowfoam) and animals (fairy shrimp) briefly come to life in vernal pools.

We found 28! (count 'em) of mid-spring flowering plants and trees during our walk. I didn't need my scruffy wildflower book because we had our resident expert Eva for the really hard-to-ID plants, and the rest of the group ID'd the others quite readily.

The list: Cleavers/Bedstraw, all 4 Shirts & Skirts/Blue-Eyed Marys, Western buttercup, Cowboy clover, Menzies larkspur, Goldfields (a single, not a fieldsworth), Howell's saxifrage, HUNDREDS of Henderson's fawn lilies, Grass widow/Satin flower, Hounds tongue, Hall's desert parsley/lomatium, Bicolor lupine, Milkmaids/Toothwort, Miner's lettuce, Slender phlox, Dwarf (hairless) wooly meadowfoam, Popcorn flower, Seep mimulus, Rosy plectritus/Spring blush, Scarlet fritallary, Shelton violet, Shooting star, Vetch, Western bittercress, Yarrow, Pacific madrone, White-leaf manzanita. 

Check out our AHG Wildflower Photo webpage to see the plants for yourself.