California wild rose

This morning while photographing beach flora, I wondered this: who thought of all the common names of flowers? And why are those the names that stuck? I had seen the strikingly beautiful flowers before but didn’t know their (not-always-beautiful) names until now. A tiny, lovely, deep-blue-purple flower with a vine shaped like a sweet pea is called common vetch. A type of ice plant, which has a dramatic magenta flower with gold center, is called a sea fig. But there’s a sunburn-red-pink rambling rose that loves the beach and it’s called something just right: California wild rose. And a tall, red-orange-yellow-variegated fellow shooting up to the sun like a cattail on fire is called (I love this) a red hot poker. So there’s poetic linguistic justice for you.