Fog Deserts of Chile
Whenever I am botanizing an area, I usually end up taking hundreds of photos in a single day. This habit of mine started during a Psilocybe session sometime years ago while I was walking around a remote area of the Mojave Desert, looking for plants and rocks. As Psilocybe is, generally speaking, an incredible “sensitizer”, it made me much more aware then I otherwise would have been of subtle nuances of not just the floral and vegetative morphology of plants, but also of subtle nuances in the landscape. In many ways, it helped to make me a better and more astute observer. At the end of that day, I realize I had taken upwards of 500 photos of what was a small area of land. I rarely botanize under the influence of Psilocybe anymore, but I have found that that experience started a habit that was an otherwise invaluable tool for learning plants and learning a landscape to me - take tons of photos, even if they are of things that you initially may not find much interest in. Later on, when you are referencing those photos - perhaps even years into the future - they may teach you things that you initially did not notice or pay attention to.
I bring this up because tonight I was looking at some of the pictures of coastal Northern Chile that I took during a single afternoon when I was down there in late 2019. To see massive organ-pipe-like arrays of Eulychnia taltalensis, covered in what had to easily be 12 or 13 different species of lichen, is something I grateful I took enough photos of to be able to study again in retrospect. Species featured here are, in order from Left to Right - Oxalis gigantea, Oxalis caesia, Chaetanthera glabrata, Eulychnia taltalensis, Paposoa laeta (formerly Rhodophiala pratensis. Amaryllidaceae), Trichocereus deserticola, Loasa nitida, Copiapoa gigantea.
