Every now and then when I’m hiking in the mountains I run across a really cool plant. Over Memorial Day weekend I was out with a group of friends on the trail to Lookout Mountain and Monogram Lake, off the Cascade River Road east of Marblemount in the North Cascades. We came across more candystick (aka sugarstick), Allotropa virgata, than I’ve seen in one place in the 25 years I’ve been hiking in the northwest. Continue reading
With the arrival of spring later this month come all sorts of early-blooming wildflowers. Candyflower is tasty as well as pretty. It’s also known as Siberian springbeauty and its scientific name is Claytonia sibirica. You’ll find it growing throughout the Pacific Northwest, except for the driest counties east of the Cascades. Look for it in damp deciduous woods or at the edge of conifer forests. It likes a little shade, but not too much.
Candyflower is closely related to miner’s lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata, which can also be found throughout most of the northwest. Both of these species are delicious spring greens. I like them raw, straight from the plant, and they’re a tasty addition to an early spring salad. Miner’s lettuce got its name because it was one of the few fresh spring greens in miner’s diets during the gold rush era. Continue reading
When you think “Christmas tree” you’re probably conjuring up a conifer. They’re those trees with (generally) evergreen needle-like leaves that bear their seeds in woody cones. Those cones are where the name conifer comes from.
Here in the Pacific Northwest conifers are the backdrop for most of our landscape, whether in the wild or the garden. In fact, if you throw a rock anywhere on the west side of the Cascades and hit a tree you’ve probably found a Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. It’s our most common conifer and is native from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. There are three varieties, but we’ll not bother with that detail today. Continue reading
I was blessed to witness a brief display of the northern lights last night. I was at Artist Point, the end of the road above the Mt. Baker Ski Area, photographing a high school senior portrait. We finished the session in the twilight and after putting my lighting gear in my truck I returned to the viewpoint for Mt. Baker and began photographing the stars in the night sky. You can get an rv, 4wd, campervan and motorhome rentals.
A little later Derek, who was also photographing the sky, and his mom called to me that the northern lights had appeared over the mountains to the north. I turned to see the eerie green glow I captured in the photo above. The display only lasted about 15 minutes before fading away. Continue reading
During the blooming season people often send me photos of plants they’ve found and can’t identify. A few days ago I received a photo of a plant I’d never seen before. It’s not in my book, Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest, nor in the Washington Wildflowers smartphone app. But I instantly recognized the genus, Orobanche. There aren’t many species in the Pacific Northwest and they’re rather distinctive. Continue reading
Last Saturday I joined a boatload (literally) of Washington Native Plant Society friends for a field trip to Vendovi Island. It’s one of the smaller of the San Juan Islands, located a few miles south of the southern tip of Lummi Island and northeast of Guemes Island. Up until 2010 it was privately held. Then the San Juan Preservation Trust purchased it and has opened it to the public from May through September.
We’d hoped to enjoy spectacular meadows of wildflowers on a couple of west-facing balds, but with our very warm and early spring the flowers were well past their prime. There was still a little camas blooming, and quite a bit of harsh paintbrush, Oregon sunshine, and death camas. Continue reading
![1003907 Redwood Sorrel foliage [Oxalis oregana]. VanDusen Botanical Garden, Vancouver, BC. © Mark Turner](/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Turner_1003907.jpg "1003907 Redwood Sorrel foliage [Oxalis oregana]. VanDusen Botanical Garden, Vancouver, BC. © Mark Turner")
Redwood sorrel, Oxalis oregana, gets that common name because it grows prolifically under the giant redwoods in northern California. But you don’t have to have redwoods to grow this attractive groundcover. Other common names for this plant are wood sorrel and Oregon oxalis. In the wild its also common in the understory of low-elevation Douglas-fir forests. It is native from British Columbia to California. Continue reading
Like a lot of photographers, I’m addicted to waterfalls. I don’t photograph them a lot because I haven’t figured out how to make money from them — too many great photos and not enough buyers. But I was down to Vancouver, Washington at the end of March for the annual Professional Photographers of Washington conference and had a morning free so I headed up the Columbia Gorge for a waterfall fix. Continue reading
One of my favorite harbingers of spring is the brilliant yellow skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus), which also goes by swamp lantern. Both names are quite descriptive and appropriate for this common wetland plant.
Skunk cabbage got that name because the blossoms have a slight skunky odor and the leaves resemble cabbage leaves when young. I’ve never found the odor of our northwest skunk cabbage to be particularly strong. There’s an entirely different skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) that’s native to eastern North America that has a much stronger odor and dark purplish-red flowers. The foliage of the two plants is similar, but ours has much brighter blossoms. Continue reading
I have a lot of respect for mountain hemlocks (Tsuga mertensiana).
They’re tough, living at high elevation in the mountains where they get hammered with wave after wave of winter storms. Young trees may get buried completely by snow, hidden for months by a deep white blanket. Old trees take on a grizzled appearance, encrusted by rime ice after nearly every storm.
If you ski at any of Washington’s west-side ski areas you’ve seen mountain hemlocks, together with subalpine firs. You can easily recognize younger hemlocks by the characteristic nodding top, bent over whether under snow or not. Old trees may have their tops broken off. When you stop to catch your breath at the side of a ski run, look for the furrowed brown bark of the hemlock, in contrast to the smoother silvery bark of the firs. Upon even closer examination, notice that the hemlock needles are short, just a half-inch or so long, and arranged all around the twigs, with a somewhat ragged appearance. Continue reading
