Curse You, Binomial Nomenclature

Bear with me here, because I need to talk about flowers for a minute. With apologies to flora-lovers - the mother of my children, chief and foremost - I must apologize for the next couple of sentences. Often, my reaction to flowers is, "Yeah, you're right. That is kinda' pretty." Being olfactorily impaired - I'm capable of smelling, just not with my nose - flowers don't always capture my attention. That being the case, I'm learning to appreciate them.

Yesterday, I helped drive my daughter's class on a field trip to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (No, I was not in Buenos Aires.) for a great hike on a fairly easy trail. When I saw this flower.

Pretty, huh?

I remembered the effect that the same flower had on me about this time last year when I saw it on the grounds of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The BANWR park employee said that the flower was named prickly poppy or cowboy egg. Another called it fried-egg flower, but I remembered the name being something different, maybe australian, having made some cursory research the previous year. See! It really made an impression on me, and I couldn't find a sign with the name on it. Anyway, somewhere along the hike, one of the park employees asked if the students knew anything about binomial nomenclature. I joked that since they are taking Latin, they are learning nomenclature and working their way up to binomials.