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Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains cover

Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Chapter 24: Papaveraceæ Poppy Family
By Stewardson Brown
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About This Book

A concise field manual that surveys the alpine and subalpine plants encountered along the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirks accessible by the trans-mountain railway, emphasizing distinct regional assemblages and plant adaptations to differences in moisture and exposure. Species are arranged by botanical families with general keys to families and genera; treatments include ferns, conifers, shrubs and the majority of herbaceous flowering plants while excluding grasses, sedges, and willows. Descriptions are accompanied by plates, watercolour illustrations and photographs, and the text relates local taxa to comparable mountain floras while noting characteristic species, habitats and elevational ranges.

Papaveraceæ
Poppy Family

Herbs with milky or coloured sap and alternate leaves or the upper rarely opposite, flowers perfect, regular or irregular; sepals 2, rarely 3 or 4, soon falling off; petals 4—6 or rarely more, folded together, often wrinkled; stamens numerous.

a Delphinium Menziesii DC. Blue Larkspur. 
b Lithophragma parviflora (Hook.) Nutt. Lithophragma.
(¾ Nat.)

Capnodes aureum (Willd.) Kuntze. Golden Corydalis.

Smooth, 4—12 inches long, diffusely branching. Leaves all but the uppermost petioled, finely cut into oblong-obovate or wedge-shaped segments. Flowers numerous in an oblong head, bright golden yellow, nearly half an inch long; spur ½ the length of the body of the corolla, outer petals keeled, not crested; pods spreading or pendulose, torulose; seeds obtuse, margined, shining, obscurely ridged.

Frequent throughout the Rockies in open ground at the lower altitudes where it has been recently burned or cleared; flowering during most of the summer.