On the way to the Grand Canyon in 2016 with Tom Chester and Nancy Accola, and on the way back from there by myself, we and I made numerous stops to see what wildflowers we could observe. This gallery will display some of those photographs and hopefully with Tom Chester's assistance I will be able to put the correct identifications on them. We basically drove to Kingman where we spent the night, and then followed I-40 to Williams and turned north on Arizona 64 to the Grand Canyon. Upon leaving the Canyon area I drove down through Prescott and the Prescott National Forest on Highways 60 and 71 on the way to the I-10 and Blythe, crossing into California there and continuing eastward to home. This gallery was a much greater task because at the time of its initial composition, half the species I photographed remained unidentified, and that's what takes the bulk of the time. The various common names were found either on Tom's webpages or on the website of the Arizona-New Mexico chapter of SEINet (Southwestern Environmental Information Network). I thank Tom Chester profusely for the time he spent identifying many of the species displayed here based on his great experience with Arizona flora gained from dozens of trips. An upside-down V next to the common name indicates an identification that is somewhat tentative, and an asterisk is for a non-native species. It was also extemely useful to me to have the incredible list that David Hollombe has compiled of the names of those people whose names are part of the epithets of all the species of North America. This represents an amount of work that I can barely comprehend, and I thank him for it.

American dragonhead
Dracocephalum parviflorum
Lamiaceae

Coues is pronounced like Cows. The apparent discrepancy between the names Coves and Coues results from the fact that the Romans did not distinguish between 'u' and 'v,' thereby permitting authors when choosing Latin names to use either interchangeably. Some authors apparently had a distaste for long strings of vowels, so 'covesii' may have seemed preferable to 'couesii.' The name Coues may also have been Latinized to Covesius, thus producing 'covesii,' just as Bigelow was Latinized to Bigelovius, thus producing 'bigelovii.'

Arizona thistle
Cirsium arizonicum var. arizonicum
Asteraceae

Wholeleaf paintbrush
Castilleja integra
Orobanchaceae
[Named for Domingo Castillejo Muñoz, 1744-1793]