I’d heard for years that glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum) will bloom through the snow, but I’d never caught one in the act until this past weekend. This fine example was at the edge of the receding snow pack in the meadow below Copper Pass in the Okanogan National Forest. Many more of the lilies were pushing their way up through the snow and showing their bright yellow buds.

Apparently glacier lilies, and other members of the species, generate enough heat as they sprout from their corms to melt the surrounding snow. This extends their growing season by a few days, which can be critically important in the high altitude meadows where they are prolific in the summer. In just a few short days these beautiful lilies will push up at the edge of the melting snow, flower, and set seed.

Not far from where I photographed this flower were other glacier lily plants that had already set seed and their leaves nearly withered away to nothingness.
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Yellow Coralroot, Corallorhiza trifida, is one of four species in this genus found in the Pacific Northwest. It’s also the one that has been eluding me for several years. Back in 2003 and 2004 when I was chasing wildflowers all over Washington and Oregon I spent parts of several days hunting for it in places where I’d been reliably informed that it grew. Each time I came up empty and in the end Phyllis and I left it out of Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest.

On June 20 I finally found it along the Goat Mountain trail in the North Cascades at about 3500′ and created the photo here, as well as many others. Yellow Coralroot grows in moist forests and can live in deep shade because it is myco-heterotrophic and derives most of its nutrients from a fungus. Other coralroots share this non-photosynthetic way of getting their food.

The place where most of the specimens were growing was a depression on a relatively flat bench part way up the mountain, just before the trail starts climbing again. If you know the trail you’ll recognize the spot. Other plants growing in the area were tiarella and oak fern. I’d passed this spot several times on previous hikes, but never in mid-June when the coralroot was blooming. Once my hiking companions and I saw the first ones we spotted many more scattered through the woods along the trail for next 1/4 mile or less.
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The Wenatchee Mountains in central Washington are home to several endemic species — plants that are found nowhere else in the world. Tweedy’s Lewisia, Cistanthe tweedyi or Lewisia tweedyi, is one of those endemics. It’s actually a little more widespread than some, but the largest populations are in the Wenatchees.

Tweedy’s is one of the showiest of the Lewisias, with multiple large salmon-cream flowers and thick succulent leaves. It blooms in mid-June in the mountains. You’ll find it scattered throughout its range, but almost always growing out of rock outcroppings and often on serpentine. Continue reading →

Occasionally mother nature does something odd, like put four parts on a plant that usually has only three. This four-petaled western white trillium (Trillium ovatum) is one such oddity. Trilliums usually have parts in threes — flowers, leaves, sepals. Like four-leaf clover, four-petal trilliums are quite rare. I think I’ve seen one sometime in my past, but can’t recall just where and when. Whether, like clover, they bring good luck is open to question. But I’ll take the optimistic view and say “yes.” Continue reading →

The Koma Kulshan chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society ventured a few miles north of the border today to check out the early spring wildflowers in Hi-Knoll and Campbell Valley Regional Parks. Hi-Knoll is a Surrey city park and Campbell Valley is just north of the US-Canada border on the south edge of Langley.

The star attraction at Hi-Knoll was two species of fawn lilies, Erythronium revolutum and Erythronium oregonum. The first is pink, and quite uncommon in northwest Washington and southwest British Columbia. Conveniently, they’re right by the trail as one enters the park. The second is white, with a bit of pale yellow on the back of the tepals. It is considerably more common, but also found along the trail at Hi-Knoll.

Bleeding heart was just getting started, salmonberries were glorious, Indian plum was still looking good but getting toward the end of its season, Ribes divaricatum was blooming nicely, and we failed to positively identify the willows we found in bloom. The showiest flower was Trillium ovatum which was at its peak and quite numerous.

Hi-Knoll Park is a short distance west of 200th Street on 50th Avenue, just across the border between Langley and Surrey. We entered Campbell Valley Regional Park from 16th Avenue eash of 200th Street. If you’re nearby they’re both worth a visit now and again in a couple of weeks when a whole new set of flowers will be blooming.

Thanks, Wayne, for organizing and leading this trip to your backyard.

A photo note: All the flowers were photographed with a 100mm macro lens with natural light. We were blessed with a nearly wind-free day under fairly bright overcast. The video was created with Animoto after lightly processing the originals in Lightroom.

Apple’s iPhone has many great features, but the camera isn’t one of them. I tried a couple of shots of early-blooming wildflowers on Pass Island at Deception Pass State Park this afternoon with results that I’m unwilling to share with anyone.

The nice big sharp display leads one to believe that photos will look good, but there are several problems. There’s no way to focus and the set focus is too distant to make nice frame-filling wildflower photos. I have several frames with beautiful grass widows (Olsynium douglasii) nodding my way and a blue sky in the background. But the flowers are soft and the background is sharp. In the bright sun it was hard to see the focus point.

Another problem is there’s no way to control the exposure.  It’s completely automatic. In this photo of a friend who came along on the trip the highlights are badly clipped. There’s nothing Photoshop can do to retrieve detail from that level of overexposure. The iPhone apparently is biased toward shadow detail. I ran into the same issue shooting bright yellow spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum).

Color balance is also completely automatic. Under mid-day sun I think the results are too blue. I’ve corrected the color in Lightroom on the photo of Kay examining the grass widows, but straight out of the camera it just isn’t acceptable.

It’s a shame the iPhone camera is so mediocre because sometimes it’s nice to just carry one small device and not be encumbered by a pack full of heavy glass and camera bodies. For a blog entry a big high-res file just isn’t necessary. I guess I’ll have to go back to carrying at least my Canon S70 pocket camera when I don’t want the bring the big iron along.

In any case, today was a fantastic day to be out in the sunshine poking around to see what had come into bloom. Washington Park in Anacortes and Pass Island at Deception Pass State Park are two of the premier early-season flower spots around here. There was more blooming on Pass Island, perhaps because it’s a little more protected. Here’s what we saw:

• grass widows (Olsynium douglasii)
• beach strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis)
• western buttercup (Ranunculus occidentalis)
• spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum)
• red-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum)
• small-flowered blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia parviflora)
• early saxifrage (Saxifraga integrifolia)
• field chickweed (Cerastium arvense) a single flower in a protected spot
• prairie stars (Lithophragma parviflorum)
• Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium)

It’s interesting to note that most of these were blooming two weeks earlier in 2008, which was also a cool spring. Our spring of 2009 is even colder.

The rainy season has begun and after a glorious and drier than normal October, it’s wet out in the woods. These Black Cottonwood leaves were covering a portion of the trail around Canyon Lake this morning. The Vine Maples lost their leaves nearly a month ago, followed by the Bigleaf Maples. The Red Alders, which aren’t colorful at all, still have a few leaves.

Of course, all the conifers and evergreen ferns are still green. That’s one of the big differences between winter in the northwest and in places that have an almost exclusively deciduous forest. I’ve come to like what we have here and don’t really want to go back to having only shades of brown in the winter forest.

Today’s hike was an easy stroll around Canyon Lake.  It’s about 2 miles and nearly level. There were still a few lingering Tiarella flowers. I saw at least one Large-leaved Geum with its bright yellow flower, and there were several of the non-native Herb Robert flowers around as well. Mostly what we looked at along the trail were the myriad of mosses on rotting logs and tree trunks and the large number of lichens. There were liverworts, too, but they look a lot like mosses or lichens if you don’t know any better.

I only carried my little Canon S70 pocket camera today.  I’d hauled my big camera along the same trail about a month ago, creating a number of nice images that I  haven’t gotten captioned yet.  It’s nice to travel light for a change.