Western Wahoo, otherwise known as Western Burning Bush or Euonymus occidentalis, is an uncommon shrub in the forests of southwest Washington. In fact, it’s considered a sensitive species and the online herbarium records withhold the exact locations of the specimens.

In Oregon, Western Burning Bush is scattered in northwestern counties and occasional elsewhere west of the Cascades. A friend pointed me to a roadside population along Oregon Route 6 northwest of Forest Grove.

Wahoo is more common in California where it’s found in several counties, mostly in the northwest and along the central coast. But it’s not common anywhere in the region.

Wahoo grows in shaded forest habitats as a rather straggly understory shrub. It would be easy to miss it if you weren’t looking for it. Which is exactly what I was doing last Tuesday. Continue reading →

I’ve been logging a lot of road miles this spring while seeking trees and shrubs for a new book. But it’s not all work and no fun.

This afternoon, after wrapping up a three-day photography workshop for the Siskiyou Field Institute in Selma, Oregon, I headed south on US 199 toward Gasquet, California. It’s only about 40 miles and I was on the lookout for several trees and shrubs. One of my scouted locations was on the old highway over Oregon Mountain, now a little-traveled back road with crumbling asphalt and wilderness-like conditions on both sides.

As I came around one of the switchback corners I spied a pair of huge western white pine trunks and decided to stop for a photo. Almost immediately I noticed the unusual and uncommon California ground-cone growing at the base of the trees. Technically, the ground-cone was under a scraggly madrone. That’s the host plant for this parasitic flowering plant with no leaves and no chlorophyll.

I moved a fallen white pine cone next to the ground-cone to show how much this plant resembles a pine cone. It’s a very cool plant, but one that I think would be nearly impossible to grow in a garden. As I drove on down the road I found another pair of ground-cones right at the edge of the old asphalt.

Even up close, ground-cone looks a lot like a pine cone. The individual flowers themselves are nearly hidden inside the purplish bracts.

You can see more photos of this plant (but not as fresh as the one I photographed today) on the PNW Flowers website. The photos there were made just a few miles west, on the outskirts of Grant’s Pass, Oregon back in 2004.

Just on the Oregon side of the border, splayed out across the grassy expanse under a power line, I found masses of Siskiyou Iris, Iris bracteata. There are scattered clumps of these yellow gems all over the southern Oregon Siskiyou region right now, but I’d never seen so many in one place. These were just outside the tiny burg of O’Brien and right at the side of US 199.

Siskiyou Iris are very growable in gardens. We have a couple of plants in our Bellingham garden, where they bloomed a week or so ago. Color is variable, from pale to deep yellow. They’re part of the complex of iris often referred to as Pacific Coast Iris.

The shocking roadside flower discovery late in the day, and along a narrow stretch of highway with no place to pull over, was a clump of California lady-slipper orchids and several clumps of Siskiyou lewisia. Both plants were growing from cracks in a cliff above the road along the Middle Fork Smith River. I had to content myself with merely enjoying a fleeting glance at them as I drove by.

Be sure to keep your eyes open, and your botany ID skills sharp, as you drive around. You never know what you might discover in an unexpected place.

When you stop to photograph roadside gems, be sure to find a safe wide spot to pull over and watch for traffic. I made these images with my 100mm macro lens, my favorite for photographing flowers. Clouds had rolled in and I worked in a light rain while shooting the ground-cone.

You know that a wide-angle lens includes a lot more in the picture than a telephoto lens. You also know that the wide-angle expands the sense of space, making objects close to the camera much larger in relation to those farther away.

Here’s a dramatic example of the difference. This photo, shot with a 16mm lens on my full-frame sensor Canon 5d Mark II camera, was made yesterday morning on Hayward Hill near Thorpe, Washington. The hillside was covered with balsamroot and lupines, a typical combination for this part of central Washington in the spring.

Notice how the flowers expand into your experience. I placed the camera fairly high and shot down on them to keep a white drizzly sky out of the frame, but included as much of the hillside as possible. The flowers were 0.410 meters (about 1 foot, 4 inches) from the lens. You can see there’s quite a bit of space between the balsamroot in the foreground and the lupines behind them, as well as the next clumps of balsamroot on up the hill.

In the second photo we’re looking at the same group of flowers, but this time photographed with a 400mm lens. That’s my 70-200 with a 2x extender at the maximum zoom. Here I’ve backed off from the flowers, which took me down the hill. Now the lens is 8.4 meters (about 27 feet, 6 inches) from the flowers. The balsamroot flowers are actually smaller in the frame than in the first photo. Just because you shoot with a longer lens doesn’t necessarily make the subject bigger.

Now the foreground flowers are clearly isolated from the background by shallow depth of field, but at the same time those background flowers are much larger and apparently closer to the ones up front. This is the telephoto compression effect.

Both of these photos were made at f/8 so you can also see the dramatic difference in depth of field between the wide and telephoto variations.

These are just the two extremes of a series of images I made of these flowers. See them all on the Kittitas May 25 page of Pacific Northwest Wildflowers. I shot the series to go into the slide lecture I use when teaching flower photography.

Next time you’re out photographing, try experimenting with different lenses as you work the same subject. It’s a great learning experience regardless of whether you use a big digital SLR or a tiny pocket camera. You may surprise yourself, discovering you like a different variation than you expected.

For those particularly interested, the arrow-leaved balsamroot is Balsamorhiza sagittata and the lupines are Lupinus sulphureus.