This photo gallery is somewhat of a departure from my usual pattern in that it does not display photos taken either on a single field trip or on more than one field trip to the same area. I have been thinking lately about all the different taxa that I have encountered only once or only at a single location, and the reasons why some things are uncommon or appear to be. Obviously some taxa are restricted in geographic terms, bloom for only a short time, or require certain conditions to flourish. Others may be more common but inhabit difficult to get to areas. In a few cases, I have encountered the taxon more than once but only have pictures from one locality. Considering that I have been going into the field for some thirteen years making hundred of trips to areas ranging from Imperial Co. to Orange Co. to Santa Barbara and Kern Cos., and from the East Mojave to Death Valley and Anza-Borrego, to Joshua Tree and the Antelope Valley, Mt. Pinos, the Channel Islands, and the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, San Jacinto, Santa Rosa and Santa Monica Mts, it would be reasonable to assume that these taxa seen only in a single place are very uncommon ones. But despite my wide-ranging forays into the field, I have visited many of these areas on only a very limited basis, and there are plenty of other people who have vastly greater experience with specific areas and localities than I do, and their reaction to seeing the inclusion of some of these photos may well be, "Oh, I've seen that in lots of places." One would really have to spend his or her entire life to say that they had truly covered all of Southern California well, and doing this photo gallery has brought that home to me in a big way.

Nevertheless the taxa included here are certainly not among the more commonly-encountered ones, and I am happy to showcase them in this gallery to demonstrate the diversity of the flora that we are fortunate to have across Southern California and because many of them have not shown up previously. The quality of the photos is not always what I would wish, since many were taken with poorer equipment than I employ now, and at a time when I was a much less competent photographer. I have had to exclude numerous examples of species that would be appropriate for this category either because they were not in bloom on the one occasion that I encountered them, or because my pictures were simply embarrassingly bad. I had little idea when I began this gallery how many species it would include, and I had thought it would be about three or four pages long. But remember that I have photographed well over 2,000 taxa, so the number included here is actually a small percentage of the total. I have also added to the usual identifying text the general locations where these photographs were taken when that information is known, although in the earlier years of my wildflower wanderings I was not always as careful as I am now to record specific dates and locations. I have purposely not included any non-native species in this gallery.