In March 2015, I was casting about to find a new hobby to fill my time. I enjoyed photography and the beauty of the outdoors. Not knowing anything about botany, I thought specializing in wildflower photography would be rewarding.

When I started, I was amazed by the rich colors and beautiful forms of the flower blooms I captured in the local desert and mountain environments. While walking the roads and trails, I would discover these unexpected gems and kneel to take their portraits. In the process, I opened a door to the world of botany and discovered new friends, both human and plant.

I post the flower portraits in these pages. Each page is dedicated to a single flower. In addition to the portrait of the bloom, I try to show images of the leaves, stems, and whole plant. I name the flower by both common and scientific names. There is a pertinent description of how to identify the flower. Some of these descriptions are more scientific than others. I indicate where and when I found the flower. All of the flower pages include an interactive Google map with a pointer (sometimes 2 or more) that indicates the location of the plant. Hovering over the pointer shows the GPS location. Some of these pointers are very accurate while others may be accurate within 1000 feet. Clicking the satellite button at the top of the map changes the map to a photographic view of the terrain.

Below the location the flower was found is a link to descriptive pages on SEINet and/or FireFly Forest. The SEINet data portal was created to serve as a gateway to distributed data resources of interest to the environmental research community within Arizona and New Mexico. It has documentation for each plant that includes many photos, descriptions, and links. The FireFly Forest site focuses on plants found at lower elevations in the Tucson and surrounding areas.

On the individual flower pages, you can navigate from flower to flower by clicking on the forward and backward thumbs on the right side of the page. There are also contents pages that display up to 16 thumbnails of different flower blooms. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to the page for that flower. The flowers are grouped alphabetically on these content pages according to their scientific family classification. The groupings are headed by a label that gives both the common and scientific name for the family. Clicking on this label will take you to a website that explains the characteristics of that family. Navigate through the content pages by clicking the yellow page numbers in the upper right corner of each page, including this one. In the last populated content pages of the website is the Miscellaneous group. These are flowers for which I have only a single example of the family it belongs to.

Lists of all the wildflowers included on the website can be accessed from each multi-thumbnail page. The flowers are grouped according to common or scientific or family name. If there is a particular wildflower you want to see, you can go directly to the page by selecting its name from one of these lists. The flowers are also grouped by color, location, and month initially found. Lastly, there is a list of the last 15 flowers added to the website. On the Wildflower home page and Page 1 multi-thumbnail page, there is a list of the resources I used to enable me to develop this hobby. These resources include mentors, literature, websites, and equipment.

I created a 2 minute video that gives glimpses of some of the beautiful flowers I have discovered. It is set to soothing music. I call it Floral Serenity. The link is on this page and on the first contents page.

Most of my images are taken in Southern Arizona around Tucson. Some are taken in other areas in Arizona. The latter photos are shown in a separate section of the website called Wildflowers of Greater Arizona which can be accessed from the blue pull-down Photo menu at the top of each page.

This website is an ongoing project. I will continue to add more flowers as I meet and photograph them.