Little Blue Oak, Lupine & Owls Clover

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San Luis Obispo County
mid morning Tuesday April 21, 1998, slide 98B_12-4
Olympus OM-4T, 28mm Zuiko, Benbo Trekker
Drum scanned 35mm Kodachrome 64 to 100mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature mid bottom

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A small blue oak on a verdant hillside grassland amongst pretty spring wildflowers under a crisp morning blue sky. A friend and I were on a short three day spring wildflower tour into Southern California. The first morning we visited this area where Shell Creek crosses SR58. I had been there several weeks earlier on this El Nino year finding some impressive displays of wildflowers. During this visit even more dense swaths of wildflowers covered the area although impressive yellow goldfields had faded.

California's most abundant oak species is the blue oak, quercus douglasii. Its preferred habitat is dry rocky foothills and as such it dominates a wide circle of such elevations around California's great Central Valley. In this area of the Coast Range elevations are rather low so much of the foothill vegetation of like area to the east in the great valley intrudes over the range.

The sandy sea sedimentary geology of the area is of the Pliocene epoch or just a few millions of years of age. This small young oak provides a nice subject given its thin open bluish-green leaf canopy allowing the aesthetic blue sky to contrast with the branching form of the tree. In that respect it appears more like an orchard almond tree.

Given the wet El Nino conditions, it was an excellent year for Southern California wildflowers. During most years this area has only modest displays of spring wildflowers. In the foreground grasses are blue petal of lupines, lupinus, magenta petals of purple owl's clover, orthoscarpus purpurascens, and white petal rays with yellow centers of coastal tidy tips, layia platysglossa.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

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