It’s January 19 and spring is starting to pop. We’ve had several warm days recently, with high temperatures around 50 and some mixed sun and rain. On my walk to the post office this afternoon to mail a couple of fine art prints to customers I perambulated along the Whatcom Creek trail and spied these bright yellow blossoms.

Shining Oregon-grape, Mahonia aquifolium, is one of our two native members of the genus here in Bellingham. It’s the earliest to bloom, although not as early as some of the garden Mahonias with even bigger and more spectacular flower clusters. The leaves sometimes take a beating when we have really cold days, but they’ll be replaced with fresh foliage when spring really arrives later on.

Hazelnuts, aka Common Filberts, also bloom very early in the spring. Well, maybe it is still officially winter. This is the non-native Corylus avellana. It is cultivated commercially around here, but has also naturalized into the wild all over the place.

Common Filbert is hard to distinguish from Beaked Filbert, our native species, unless you catch them in fruit. But Common Filbert starts blooming in December and Beaked Filbert doesn’t usually get going until March. For more details on distinguishing them see Botanical Electronic News #389 and scroll down to a comparative table.

Both Filberts bear separate male and female flowers on the same plant. What you’re seeing here are the male flowers, full of pollen. The female flowers are tiny and look like little red bristles. You might not even see them unless you’re looking for them.

I made both of these photographs with my Canon S70 pocket camera, shooting RAW. It can be a little tricky to get the autofocus to make the part of the photo you want to be sharp actually in focus. I used the camera’s macro mode, set by the button with the little tulip symbol, and the lens zoomed all the way out. That’s the standard way to do closeups with most pocket cameras. The trick is to “steer” the autofocus point. On the Canon I pressed the SET button and then used the direction buttons around it to move the focus point (the green box) to my main subject. It takes a little practice to get the hang of it.

Because I was working so close, I couldn’t really put my subject in the center, focus, and then reframe because the distance to the lens would change and I’d lose sharpness. I was in aperture priority mode and stopped down to f/6.3 for these if I remember correctly. For the Hazelnut I hold onto the branch and the camera together to keep the distance from changing in the breeze.

Both of these photos have had a little processing in Adobe Lightroom.

Now that stuff is starting to bloom, all you flower nuts need to get out and start shooting. OK, you don’t really need blossoms for creative images as my friend David Perry points out on his blog and Facebook page. Or maybe you’re just drooling over little green blades of crocus like Mary Ann Newcomer over in Boise. Just find some inspiration and go to it.

Oh yeah, that fancy word in the first paragraph was the word of the day for January 19 at thesaurus.com. Perambulate sounds so much nicer than plain old walking.

Do you dream in color or shades of brown? How do you remember places you’ve visited? Did you grow up with black & white TV and add color in your mind?

Here in western Washington, the monochromatic season is upon us. The contrast is much more dramatic than the seasonal changes in eastern Washington where this photo was made last June. On the dry side of the Cascades the green season is very short, only a month or two, and the brown season lasts the rest of the year. I’ve accentuated it a bit in this image.

While I don’t want to live on the dry side of the mountains, I enjoy spending time over there. The diversity of plant life is greater than in our dense forests. As I understand it, that’s mostly due to the more challenging environment. In this desert environment plants are spread out farther from one another so their extensive root systems can pull up enough water.

The flower blooming here, seen in false color, is Columbia Cutleaf (Hymenopappus filifolius). It’s a composite that grows on the nearly pure sand found along the Columbia River.

The original photo is below.

Both versions were processed in Adobe Lightroom from an original shot with a Canon 1Ds Mk II and a 24-105mm lens at 28mm. I can’t remember for sure, but I think I was using a polarizing filter that day to increase the contrast in the sky and cut reflections on the foliage. The location is about a mile or two south of the Vantage I-90 bridge and is one of my favorite places along the river because of the high diversity of plants there in the spring.

I had a family portrait session reschedule from Sunday afternoon, so I took a look at the clouds to the east and decided to head up to Heather Meadows and Artist Point for some landscapes. I didn’t get out of town until after 2 pm, which was fine since I really wanted sunset at 7:10.

This is the season to pick wild blueberries and I ran into several people on the trail who had big containers of the tasty fruit. The photo here is of a Cascades Blueberry, which has the very appropriate Latin name of Vaccinium deliciosum. They’re indeed among the tastiest of our native blueberries (which some folks call huckleberries). This was a case of being able to eat my subject after finishing photographing it.

I picked and ate a goodly number of blueberries along the trail, savoring the sweet morsels. I didn’t take a container to bring any home, but if I had I certainly could have filled it without much difficulty.

My other favorite species is the Black Huckleberry, Vaccinium membranaceum. They grow on bigger shrubs and don’t produce as much fruit.

While the blueberries were nearly everywhere along the Bagley Lakes Trail, the botanical gem of the day was this little Alpine Wintergreen, Gaultheria humufusa. It’s one of two low-growing relatives of Salal that we have in the northwest.

This was the first time I’ve found Gaultheria humufusa, although I’ve looked for it over the past several years. Our native plant society had a field trip on the same trail a couple of weeks ago and the group reported having seen it and told me where they’d found it. There was just a small patch, not much more than a meter across, on the rocks just above the trail. Each leaf is only about 3/4 inch long and the berries were a little less than 1/4 inch across.

The Grapeferns (right) get their name because their spore-bearing structures resemble bunches of grapes. This little specimen is Lanceleaf Grapefern, Botrychium lanceolatum. It’s only about 3 inches tall and very easy to miss. I spied four plants just off the Bagley Lakes Trail. I probably would have missed them if it weren’t for another larger species of Botrychium that caught my eye within a foot of the trail.

Among fern aficionados the Grapeferns are among the sought-after species. They’re uncommon, more primitive than most other ferns, generally small, and rather interesting in the way they grow and produce spores. We have several species in the North Cascades, but I don’t come across them often and when I do it’s usually in the company of someone who knows more about them than I do. The Yellow Aster Butte trail is known to be home to several Botrychiums but you’d have to know where to look to find them.

What would a day at Heather Meadows and Artist Point be without photographing Mt. Shuksan? It’s probably the most-photographed mountain in the world. Did I need another variation? Likely not. Could I resist? Of course not.

This dusk photo was made with the iconic mountain reflected in the calm waters of a small tarn toward the end of the Artist Ridge trail, just below Huntoon Point. It’s a favorite vantage point, but a little harder to get to than the standard view from Picture Lake. I met a good many people heading back to their cars as I walked out the trail to the tarn.

I knew that sunset would be about 7:10 pm so I got in position in time for the sunset light on the mountain. I’d hoped that the clouds that lingered most of the afternoon would still be around the mountain at sunset, but they dissipated before the light got sweet. Oh well. I shot the sunset, and then waited around a while.

This is the last variation I made, at 7:38 pm. The sky was starting to darken, giving a nice glow to the glaciers below the summit. I often find that I like the after-sunset light even better than earlier in the evening. Sometime I’d like to do a family portrait here.

Late summer is getting toward the end of the wildflower season in the North Cascades. There’s not a whole lot still blooming after the long dry summer except the asters and goldenrod. Last weekend Natalie and I went up to Colonial Creek on Diablo Lake to camp for a couple of nights and have a little relaxed time together in the woods.

While poking around at the edge of Diablo Lake near the campground we found purple asters blooming. At first, they all looked the same. On closer examination we found there were three species. One of these was the Great Northern Aster pictured here.

Great Northern Aster, Canadanthus modestus (formerly known as Aster modestus), is unique among the purple asters with very glandular stems and involucral bracts. That last term, for the uninitiated, means the little leaf-like things at the base of the flower head. On this species, the bracts are fairly long, sharply pointed, curving outward, and purplish in color. That makes them pretty distinctive. The stem and involucre are both noticably sticky to the touch, an easy way to tell if a plant is glandular.

Great Northern Aster grows in moist places. We found it just a few feet back from the edge of Diablo Lake between the woods and the gravel beach. These photos were made at the moist edge of Thunder Lake, which is the pond between Hwy 20 and Thunder Knob just west of Colonial Creek.

I’d often wondered what the shore of Thunder Lake was like, but never had time to stop and hike the short distance down to it until this weekend. There’s no trail around the lake, which was a disappointment. I thought I could walk in the shallow water at lake’s edge, but my feet quickly sank ankle-deep in the muck and I decided that wasn’t a very good idea.

Besides the asters, we found foliage of marsh cinquefoil, yellow pond lily, a nice grass we couldn’t identify in Pojar & Mackinnon’s Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and on a fallen Douglas-fir log extending out into the pond were numerous carniverous sundews. At the south end were some large rushes, but we didn’t get close enough to ID them. The only plant I photographed was the aster, which I hadn’t seen up close for several years.

After getting tired of trying to identify plants I decided the lake was warm enough for a swim, so I stripped off and dived in off the log. The water was a perfect temperature and I swam to the opposite side of the lake and back, returning refreshed and relatively clean for the drive home.

I guess it’s a sign of being a true plant nerd to take off on a day trip halfway across the state to look for one plant that may not even be in bloom.

There’s been a fair amount of chatter recently on the Native Plant Society of Oregon e-mail discussion list about sightings of Orobanche pinorum, pine broomrape. It’s one of the plants I missed finding in bloom while I was working on Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest so I wanted to find and photograph it. But I didn’t feel like driving down to southern Oregon to the places where this uncommon parasite had been reported. I checked the WTU Herbarium online records and found it reported in Yakima and Klickitat Counties in Wasington. Then I queried the Washington Native Plant Society e-mail list and received a response saying it was just east of the Cascades near Leavenworth. The herbarium records said plants in bud in July and gone to seed in September. The third week of August seemed possible to find it in bloom.

Sunday Natalie and I hopped in the truck and zipped over Stevens Pass to Fish Lake, just up the road from Lake Wenatchee. We parked at the Cove resort and started poking around under every ocean spray (Holodiscus discolor) we could find. That’s the host plant for the misnamed pine broomrape. After about half an hour of searching I found the specimen in the photo. It was just off a small trail along the south side of the lake, about at the drip line of a small ocean spray. There were ponderosa pines towering overhead.

As you can see, we were about three weeks too late to catch it in bloom. It’s still an interesting plant, and now that I know at least one place where it grows I can go back earlier in the season another year.

Since we were already east of the mountains I thought it worthwhile to go looking for another uncommon plant I’d missed in a previous year.
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Here’s one of my favorite true alpine plants from the North Cascades. It’s called Moss Campion, Silene acaulis, and you’ll only find it at high elevations in the mountains. Here it’s growing among the rocks on the shoulder of Mount Larrabee with one of the summits of The Pleides in the background.

Moss Campion grows as a ground-hugging little bun, often appearing as a soft mound among the rocks. Its roots seek out cracks in the rocks, penetrating deep to find pockets of lingering moisture and nutrients. It blooms soon after the snow melts and once the flowers fade all you’ll see is a pale green lump. But when it’s in full bloom it can be spectacular.

Sometimes I’ve seen it high on a cliff, the bright pink flowers calling attention to it and presumably attracting the bees that pollinate the blossoms. In those instances it is so far out of reach as to be impossible to photograph. Even if I were to rappel down to it how would I set up my tripod while dangling in space?

I found this clump, as well as several others that had finished blooming, on a day hike of the High Pass trail Saturday. The weather had cooled off a bit and the bugs weren’t too bad. Starting at Twin Lakes the trail rises a little, then descends a couple hundred feet through moist flower-filled meadows before contouring around the hill and ascending a series of switchbacks to Low Pass. Then it continues climbing to High Pass and a well-worn boot track gains another 500 or so feet to the shoulder of Mount Larrabee. I only met a couple of other people on the trail, and they were on their way back to the lakes from bear hunting. They said it was the first day of bear season but they didn’t see any bears.
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You can’t get much more alpine than this!

The Deming Glacier flows south off of Mt. Baker, bending around beneath the steep cliffs of the Black Buttes before flowing out into the Middle Fork Nooksack River. It’s the most dramatic example of glaciation in Washington’s North Cascades that I know of. I’m always impressed when I get up on the side of Mt. Baker to look down on the Deming.

Saturday I got there pretty much by accident. I started out to scout a route into the Twin Sisters range, but there was a “road closed” sign blocking my way. Since I was already on the south side of Baker I decided to head up to Schreiber’s Meadows and hike the Scott Paul trail on Baker’s south flank. I’d never hiked it, but heard the views were great and I knew it would take me to the edge of the glaciers.
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