Random Wednesday!

(Click for bigger. You can see some cool depth-of-field effects in the big one!)

This is a Sego Lily - isn't it interesting? It's one of the many flower pictures from this summer that I alluded to earlier. =) According to my Philmont Fieldguide:

Early Mormon settlers ate the bulbs of the Sego Lily when other food sources were scarce. Today the Sego Lily is the state flower of Utah. The bulbs have long been a source of food for the Navajo and Hopi Indians as well. The genus name, Calochortus, is Greek for beautiful herb.

Neat, eh?

I'd love to link you to the Fieldguide so you can purchase your very own, but it's currently not for sale, as it is being re-written (which it desperately needs!). The writers and photographer came through camp one day on a flower hunt. We'd just had a hailstorm that destroyed a lot of our flowers (including this rose!) and so I showed them the pics I had on my D40. They really liked them and asked me to submit them, for possible inclusion in the guide! Cool! Maybe they were just pretending to be interested, to humor me, but I still thought it was neat. The new guide probably won't be out for a few years, by which time I'll probably have forgotten all about it. Hopefully they'll let me know if they do decide to use anything!

Happy Wednesday! =)