Siskiyou Mountains tiny flower

[Diane Whitehead]

These are tiny pink or white-flowered plants, in bloom in late May.   
Pine needles are visible in some photos, which can help show the size.

The district botanist could not name it.

[arisaema]

Trientalis latifolia? T. europaea is flowering here in Norway at the moment.

[Robert]

My guess is Trientalis latifolia based on the pink flowers, it looks like the pedicels are < leaves, leaves are + or - in a whorl at the end of the stem. Hard to tell from the photographs. Trientalis europaea is found from Del Norte County, California, northward into Canada, Alaska, and other northern areas. As I remember, Trientalis has been subsumed into the Genus Lysimachia as has Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagalis arvensis, now Lysimachia arvensis). If I remember correctly the debate over Anagalis vs Lysimachia has been going on for some time now. The are still in the Myrsine Family, Myrsinaceae.

Trientalis latifolia can also be found as far north as British Columbia. Here in our part of California they are quite common in the mid-elevation forest of the Sierra Nevada.

[Diane Whitehead]

Thanks!  That was a really quick identification.

Now that I'm home, I looked it up in my B.C. book by Pojar and Mackinnon,
and know why we had trouble identifying it using the U.S. books we travelled
with.

Coastal B.C. book:  "petals 5 - 9, usually 6 or 7, fused at the base"

The first flower we photographed had 6 petals, but that species is listed
with "5 symmetrical petals forming a tube" in the book by Turner and
Gustafson.  There was nothing remotely like it in their section "3 or 6 petals".

I don't know why the botanist didn't know it, but the picture we showed him
didn't show the whole leaf arrangement.