Wildflowers of Brighton Town Park

Randal C. Nelson, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester

Enter keywords describing the flower (e.g. red three-petals) and hit submit. Flowers that match all the keywords will be selected. Useful terms include color, family, number of petals, descriptive terms such as cluster or umbel, etc. Usually just the word is enough, but if there are a lot of hits due to redundant meanings (e.g. pink is both a color and a family, then the term can be refined as pink-color, pink-family etc. It is best to use fewer rather than more terms to narrow the field, as this reduces the chance you will enter a term the author neglected to (e.g. sessile-leaves), which would cause a match to be missed. Entering -k will get everything in the collection.

Glossaries: Leaves Flowers

Brighton Park

The town park in the Rochester suburb of Brighton NY is an underappreciated floral treasure. This 28 acre, mostly undeveloped property in the shadow of a soaring highway interchange, encompasses fields, forests, and wetlands. The diversity of habitat supports an amazing variety of native and naturalized wildflowers. Over 200 species bloom here, not counting grasses and sedges. Some days in August, over 100 different plants can be found flowering. This is the greatest natural variety I have found in a similarly-sized locale, anywhere in the Rochester area.

This electronic field guide is intended to help you easily identify flowers that you find. Unlike paper guides, which by necessity are organized along a single axis such as color, the electronic format allows you to exploit a variety of cues with equal ease (number of petals, leaf form, partial classification etc.) Let me know what you think. Comments to NOSPAM-nelson@cs.rochester.edu.