Sometimes plants raise many questions when we find them in the field.  Castilleja levisecta, golden paintbrush, is a rare species that is only found in a very small number of places and in some of those there are only a few plants. I visited one of those sites last week to make the photograph above and spent about an hour working with the plants on a windy late afternoon. The location is hazardous and not one I’d recommend visiting as the slope is steep and slippery.  I almost wished for crampons and a belay as I carefully placed my feet to avoid damaging the habitat.

At this particular location golden paintbrush is quite prolific, but only within a small area on the bluff. Go just a short distance north or south and the plant is nowhere to be found. Why does it apparently thrive there and not elsewhere? The slope, which is rather sandy soil, is slowly eroding back away from the beach. How does the paintbrush deal with this natural force? Paintbrushes are hemiparisitic, forming a relationship with a host plant to help them extract nutrients from the soil. But they aren’t super picky about the host, growing with a number of grasses, Artemisia species, and Oregon sunshine. What is their preferred host here? There are both grasses and Oregon sunshine on the slope and I found golden paintbrush among both.  I also found weedy introduced species like Rumex acetosella, sour dock, on the slope.

This area has had human influence a long time, by white settlers and by Native Americans before them. But the bluff is probably infrequently visited.  Work is underway to reestablish golden paintbrush in other locations throughout its former range from seed collected in places like this, propagated in a greenhouse, and then planted out. There’s been some success getting the transplants to grow, but it’s a long slow process.

Photographers often bracket exposures, shooting what the meter says and then a little overexposed and a little underexposed to make sure they get one that is perfect. It’s just as important with digital as with film as digital sensors are prone to blowing out overexposed highlights and shadows can get noisy. But there’s another bracketing technique that I also find useful.

I photographed these Bog Laurel, Kalmia microphylla, blossoms yesterday afternoon at Burns Bog in Delta, British Columbia. I like to separate the main subject from the background, and one of the effective ways to do that is to that is to shoot at a relatively wide aperture to the plane of focus from front to back is shallow. The background goes soft. In the photo above I used f/5 with my 100mm macro lens. I like the soft background, but only the buds and the blossom on the right are truly sharp.

Then I stopped down just over a stop to f/8 and made another exposure. You can see that the background is not as soft in this one, but more of the blossoms are sharp. I used my camera’s depth of field preview before I shot, checking smaller apertures as well. By the time I got to f/11 the background was too busy and I didn’t waste time shooting that one. I still haven’t decided whether I like the softer background or the sharper flowers better. With Photoshop I could combine the two and I think it would still look natural, but that’s a fair amount of work. In any case it’s all about choices, and sometimes it’s easier to shoot several variations and make the discriminating decisions later.

Burns Bog is a unique and disappearing ecosystem in southern British Columbia. It’s being pushed in from all sides by farming, development, and highways. As I was working along the boardwalk through the Delta Nature Preserve, the only part of the bog currently open to the public, my ears were constantly assaulted by the sound of traffic on nearby highway 91 at the south end of the Alex Fraser bridge over the Fraser River. On my visit yesterday the shrub thicket of Labrador Tea and Bog Laurel was just beginning to bloom. I’ll go back in a week or so when there should be more blossoms. See more of yesterday’s photos at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers.

I’ve been working up a list of plants that I didn’t find in bloom for Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest, or that we didn’t plan to include for one reason or another. One of those plants is a small shrubby tree, Pacific crabapple. Phyllis and I left it out of the book because we mostly excluded trees. I’d never made an effort to find it until this year. I asked my native plant colleagues for help finding where it grows and several people pointed me to locations. I found plants a week or so ago, but not in bloom.

I also found lots of escaped cultivated apple trees blooming in the woods and near wet areas where the native crabapple grows. While some of the escaped apple trees are quite big, it’s easy to confuse them with the native. The flowers look a lot alike, especially when you find an apple with white instead of pink blossoms. You have to look close to see the difference: 3 pistals in the native crabapple and 5 pistals in the domestic apple blossoms.

This is a blossom of the Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca, which has 5 white petals, about 20 stamens, and 3 pistals. Sometimes the leaves on the crabapple have a small lobe on one or both sides, but not always.

I found this specimen just starting to bloom in the Connelly Creek Nature Area on Bellingham’s south side. More photos are on Pacific Northwest Wildflowers under May 14, 2008.

This blossom is on an escaped cultivated apple, Malus pumila, which has 5 pinkish petals, about 20 stamens, and 5 pistals. It’s difficult to count pistals in a photo, even when viewed at higher resolution than is possible on the web. It can be challenging even in the field. Very good close-up eyesight or a hand lens is essential. I found it helpful to pull the stamens off a blossom so I could clearly see the pistals.

You can see more photos of the cultivated apples that initially fooled me, as well as some other plants in bloom around Bellingham on May 6 at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers.

Sometimes distinguishing what’s native and what’s not is even more difficult.  For example, Prunella vulgaris or self-heal, is both native and introduced and it’s the same species, not even differentiated by subspecies or variety. The differences are subtle and for the most part when it’s the same species I don’t get too carried away trying to tell them apart.

This diminutive very early-blooming plant eluded me when I was chasing flowers to include in Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. I spent many hours searching for it, in locations where reliable sources said I would find it, all to no avail. In the end, we left it out of the book. But it’s been nagging at me, or calling to me, or something like that ever since.

When I received my Native Plant Society of Oregon February newsletter which announced an Emerald Chapter field trip to Mount Pisgah Arboretum to see Enemion stipitatum I decided I just had to drive down. Since it’s about 400 miles from Bellingham to Eugene I inquired a few days in advance whether the flowers had started to bloom. So last Friday I tossed my sleeping bag in the back of the truck, loaded up the camera gear, and headed south. I stopped briefly at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle to photograph Witchhazels and then got back into the nasty Friday afternoon Puget Sound traffic on I-5. I slept in the back of my truck at a rest stop just north of Eugene.

I got to Mt. Pisgah early, so got a little exercise by hiking the 1000 feet vertical to the top of the mountain, climbing out of the valley fog into glorious warm sunshine. I ran most of the way back down so I wouldn’t miss the group.

Thirty people showed up for the field trip, which is a large number for a native plant outing. There were concerns expressed about the big group doing damage to the plant we’d all come to see, but as far as I could tell everyone was very respectful of the resource and no little flowers got trampled.

I had expected a small flower, but not quite as small as it turned out to be. Plants were scattered among grasses, fallen leaves, and the foliage of a weedy geranium so you really had to look to find them. The habitat is near the river, where it floods periodically, in open forest of Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana).

With my tripod as low as it would go, I photographed two specimens of the Enemion, working with a 100mm macro lens and then with an extension tube as well. For some photos I had the camera right on the ground to look the blossoms in the eye. As the fog lifted, I pulled out my diffuser to soften the bright sunlight. You can see all the variations, as well as the two other plants in bloom on Saturday, at Mt. Pisgah on my web pages.

Am I certifiably crazy to drive 800 miles round trip to see one tiny plant?  Perhaps.  But I read about birders flying across the country to see some rare bird.  At least plants don’t take wing before you get there.

Late April and early May are prime time to view Camas (Cammasia quamash) prairies in western Washington. I visited two of them last week. These prairies were a lush contrast to the open sagebrush-studded area where I’d photographed just a few days earlier in central Washington. Follow the links to see galleries of images from all three places.

Lacamas Lake Park in Clark County was a new area to me, with several modest size Camas prairies, most ringed by Garry Oaks (Quercus garryana). I also came across a plant combination I’d never seen before — Oregon Fawn Lilies growing with Camas.

Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve, in Thurston County just south of Olympia, is one of the few remaining remnants of mounded prairie in the South Puget Sound area. There’s a paved interpretive trail, as well as two longer loops among the mounds. In addition to Camas, I saw Western Buttercups, Spring Gold, Serviceberry, Kinnickinick, and Early Blue Violets among the grasses. It was a dark and windy afternoon, with rain threatening so I didn’t spend as much time as I might have under more pleasurable weather conditions. Continue reading →