The Firefly Forest

With its pure red flowers, Cardinalflower, Cardinal Flower, or Scarlet Lobelia (Lobelia cardinalis) is one of the most brightly colored wildflowers in North America. Cardinalflower is found growing in moist areas throughout much of the United States, including here in Arizona. With August thunderstorms rumbling nearby, I observed this blooming Cardinalflower in a riparian meadow along Arizona's Sycamore Canyon Trail near the Mexican border.

Cardinalflower is a perennial herb with alternate, toothed, oblong, green leaves and red (rarely white), tubular, 5-lobed (2 upper and 3 lower) flowers on upright stems up to 5 feet (1.5 m) tall, but usually much less. Here in southeastern Arizona, the flowers bloom with the summer monsoon rains.

Although it requires moist soil and is not drought tolerant, this native wildflower is cultivated as an ornamental plant, and it makes an especially nice addition to natural wildflower gardens because the red flowers attract hummingbirds. Cardinalflower is not a popular garden plant here in hot, arid Arizona, but it does quite well in areas with more rainfall in the eastern parts of North America.

Because it contains the alkaloid Lobeline, Cardinalflower is poisonous, but like many other poisonous plants, its toxins can have medicinal uses if carefully dosed and prepared (beware of using it as a home remedy). Lobeline is used to treat nicotine addiction in smoking cessation, and it may be useful for treating other forms of drug addiction as well.

Hello readers! I'm moving to the Big Island of Hawaii in May of this year. I'll be living in the Puna District, which is south of Hilo on the rainy, windward, less expensive side of the island. I'm very excited, but it will be a big change from sunny, arid Tucson. I'll have to learn a whole new set of plants and animals, but I'm up for the challenge. This part of the island is noted for its lush, tropical vegetation and many nurseries, especially those growing orchids and anthuriums, so I will have no shortage of interesting native, introduced, and cultivated plants to photograph.

This website will happily continue on with the addition of Hawaiian species, and I will also keep adding more Arizona species as well. I have a huge backlog of Arizona photos (thousands of them), so I have plenty of future material. I also hope to revisit southeastern Arizona in the future, especially some of those interesting areas a bit more distant from Tucson (like the Chiricahua and Huachuca Mountains) that I really haven't explored as much as I would have liked due to the constraints of work, school, and limited funds.

Given my website's name and my future home, you might be wondering if there are fireflies in Hawaii… No, unfortunately there are no fireflies in Hawaii, but I am keeping the website name anyway because I'm such a big fan of these remarkable insects. In the future, I'll just have to travel if I want to see fireflies.