I am looking for a good easy wildflower identification site, coded by colour hopefully, where I can go to i.d. a wildflower I saw on a walk here on Vancouver Island. I thought there was one I had found last year for BC or Vancouver Island, but now I can't find it. There is the E-Flora site but I can't figure out how to use it, and I get SO impatient with too much scientific verbiage around this kind of thing -- I exclaim impatiently, "No, I don't know the scientific name, that's what I want to find out!" The plant I am looking for is purplish-blue, about a foot high, has bell-like hanging flowers off one stem in a spiked cluster, with unopened flowers at the top of the cluster sort of like a lupin or a common garden bulb plant, and has long spikey leaves and must be a bulb-type plant. It grows nearby camass flowers, but isn't the same thing. It may be an escaped garden plant, but I don't think so. All I want is an easy-to-use website with no nonsense in it about botanical matters which clutter up the page... Help!
I did a google query on wildflowers by color, and a Wildflowers Information Chart at WildflowerInformation.org came up. Here's a site from Dorothy Pugh that's easier to browse. Here's another page you can browse from NC State University. For perennials, I queried plants by color, and Phoenix Perennials' Plants by Color page came up. A lot of other sites came up from both these queries. Over to you. Maybe you could post the ones you find the most useful here.
As for the plant, foxglove comes to mind. Although, it does not have spiky leaves. Another possibility - agava.
I think I will have to rule out any of the taller Campanulas, as I did a bit of further checking last night and the plant looks more like a Muscari or hyacinth variety... it is quite thick-stemmed and a firm upright thing, with the clustered flowers on the main stem closely-packed and unopened on the upper part, with the opened bell-like flowers on the lower part, pointed downward, but the opened flowers are somewhat loosely arranged. More light purple than blue, as I remember. Not "lipped", I don't think. I'll have to back and look again. But we did notice that the leaves are like a bulb-plant's leaves, long and strap-like, not along the stem -- I don't think. I couldn't decide if any of the Muscari were actually it, I'll have to study it further. I will investigate the other websites, thank you -- I did once find a sort of "official" BC site but I am not sure where it is, now...
Here's a forums resources page I was looking for yesterday: PNW Native Plants Resources That's really where entries should go for sites that are helpful for this search. If you find the place and post it on that resources page, you'll be able to find it again.
I thought the description sounded like a bluebell too, but wasn't sure if they had been introduced in B.C.
