9 October. PM
Straight from the airport we headed out to the field. We drove west and quickly left Santiago behind. Soon we drove off the highway into a smaller road that curved into the hills. The traffic and people disappeared quickly and we started to drive on small roads. After a quick coffee and empanada we ventured into s side road, kind of a long loop in our way to Valparaiso. The hills wore a dry vegetation cover and soon I started spotting columnar cacti, which are one of my favourite types of plants. The physiognomy of the landscape reminded me of some arid zones in Mexico, although here the vegetation was more dense and some hills seems to be much greener. At the side of the road, there amazing blooms of yellow and orange flowers. “They are exotics, from California”, said Garzón when I asked what was this common flower we kept seeing in every road and open field, “But they are not really invasive and usually stay close to the road and agricultural fields”. This was hard to believe as the fields of orange extended in some places for hundred of meter. It was beautiful to see the explosion of yellow/orange of a plant that had made Chile its home since the mid 1800s. This part of the country seemd to be full of exotic plants from around the world: Eucalyptus from Australia, Opuntia from Mexico, Gorse from Europe, Eschcholzia from California and the list went on. Gasto; later confirmed that about 15% of the Chilean flora has a foreign origin.
The goal of the day was to find Mimulus luteus. The plant I studied in Scotland but that traced its origins to high parts of the Chilean Andes. A friend of Gaston had run into a population that seemed to be oddly placed, on the east side of the Santiago valley. Most populations occur in the east side of the valley at higher elevations on the Andean slopes. This was a population that had been spotted in flower a couple of weeks ago by a friend of Gaston. The problem was that the friend could not take a good GPS record as when he was trying to sample it, he had fallen off and broken his elbow! So we were driving looking for a patch of yellow flowers somewhere along a ravine surrounded by slippery rocks. Exciting!
We drove for a few hours exploring the country side and seeing many cool things along the way. Raptors, unusual birds, pencil-tailed mice, and a Mirian of flowers including two awesome species of Calceolaria that were being visited by oil collecting Centris bees. But no Mimulus luteus.
After a while we decided to stop on a recently build bridge and try our luck in the dwindling stream that managed to stay wet despite the driest year in the last 80 in this part of Chile. We parked the SUV on the roadside and asked permission from a farmer to pass through his field and onto the river. He kindly agreed, and we walked closely guarded by three dogs that stared and growled from the other side of the fence, held back by tenuously attached metal chains. I was terribly excited when among the gravel of the river bed we spotted the typical leaves of what could only bee a monkey flower! But the surprise came when we found plants flowering. They were monkeyflowers alright, the typical yellow flower with small red spots at its center. Except that these were tiny flowers! I was even more excited when I realised that this species was not Mimulus luteus, the species we set to find, but instead a related species that I had some hope we were going to find further south, the diminutive Mimulus glabratus. This is a monkeyflower that occurs from Michigan to southern Chile, in an amazing feat of transcontinental distribution. But the Chilean populations here are special, as they have multiplied their genome and instead of having two copies like you and me, they had six copies of each chromosome! A miniature monkeyflower but a DNA giant!
