(Photo: V. McIntyre)
The Botany/Mycology Group was privileged to have Marta Donovan lead the group in a very informative walk through MacDonald Wood Park and Mack Laing Nature Park in Comox on April 9.
Marta is a professional botanist who recently retired after working for 26 years for the BC Conservation Data Centre, a program for the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. She compiled the provincial list of plants in BC, assessing their conservation status and mapped the locations of species at risk in the province.
The two parks, while close together, evidence somewhat different environments and plant communities, and Marta very usefully pointed out the differences. She highlighted many characteristic plant species in each park in the context of the structural layers of the forest.
Following the practice started with the group’s March walk at the Tsolum floodplain, group co-leader Véronique has created very useful photographic identification guides to most of the species observed on this walk using her own photos and additional research. You can download the two guides (one for each park) here:
- MacDonald Wood Park plants (PDF, 6.8 MB)
- Mack Laing Park plants (PDF, 7.6 MB)
