No Trespassing!

This is one of the first brooms I found- on a Pinus contorta var latifolia tree in WA.  It was right on the side of the road on a busy highway.  Since the branch was hanging over the ditch (public right-of-way), I figured that it was fair game.  My dad and I stopped by with a pole pruner one December morning several years ago and got some cuttings.  It was oddly brittle, and sizable chunk broke off.  In fact, the dead portion on the front is from where it broke- this pic was from a year or two later.

I had half a dozen rootstocks at home, and grafted them up.  Not a single graft took.  The annoying thing about conifer grafts is that you must wait for several months to find out if you were successful or not.  The grafts can look wonderful until the first warm days of late spring.  Then they can suddenly die.

Still others might live- but the new buds have all died, so it will never grow.  Such a graft dies within a year or two.

I had to try grafting this tree about three times before getting one graft to take.  It still grows in my garden today.  Here's a picture of it from a couple of years ago:

As you can see, it has kept its congested growth pattern.  Its ultimate form remains to be seen.  It may or may not look like a tiny replica of the  original broom.

The last time I collected scions from the broom, I got a few tiny pine cones.  I had read that broom hunters will sometimes germinate the seeds- roughly half of which will produce dwarfed offspring.  

The trouble was the cones were glued shut with resin.  Lodgepole pine is a species that is highly dependent on fire.  It is shade intolerant, so it can only regenerate in sunny positions.  Because of this, it has a number of adaptations to both encourage fire and reseed afterwards.  Mature lodgepoles contain a lot of dead wood in their canopies-  they actually are adapted to encourage the fires that almost inevitably killed them in pre-settlement North America.  These fires were often hot enough to kill all of the trees in stands, leaving a charred landscape devoid of trees.  Such landscapes are perfect for pine seedlings...

In addition to dead wood, lodgepole pines build up large reserves of cones that are sealed shut with resin.  During the heat of a fire, the resin melts and the seeds fall to the ground- onto the freshly fire-prepared seedbeds.

Alas, I digress.  What this meant for me was that I had to melt the resin to get the seeds out.  I did this by dry-roasting the cones briefly in the oven- just long enough to get the cones to open.

I managed to get two seedlings out of the deal- one of which is clearly dwarfed.   I'm still not sure about the other one.  Time will tell.

Guthrie

Last summer, I was dog sitting for a friend.  As part of the deal, I was able to borrow her car for the week- she had flown out of town.

At one point during that week, the dog and I just had to get out of the house.  We drove up into the Oregon Cascades and set out to find some random landmarks.  (No, I will not be discussing any specific locations in this blog.)

Unexpectedly, as we drove through startling old-growth Douglas fir trees, we encountered spectacular thickets of Pacific Yew- Taxus brevifolia.

This species contains alkaloids that are used for chemotherapy (this is a theme throughout the plant world, it seems)  It is toxic as fuck, and they use it to kill breast and prostate cancer.  Even though I suppose you will all eventually guess my gender if you haven't already...  I am genetically predisposed to one of those cancers.  Maybe someday I'll be chowing down some taxanes to prevent my special parts from mutating and killing me.

Mutation...  totally the theme of this blog.

Anyhow...  the dog and I got out to pee and wandered around the woods a bit.  I have a thing for conifers, and I was really hoping to see a broom in one of the yew trees.  The term broom can refer to any kind of congested growth on any plant (usually a woody plant.)  In conifers, they are usually caused by pathogens or parasites.  Conifer nuts search for specific brooms that are caused by genetic mutations.  You can usually tell the difference because a pathogen-induced broom looks like a nasty, fucked-up tangle of shit.  A genetic mutation usually looks like a tidy little dwarf tree that was glued onto the branch of a normal tree.  Rarely, they might have some color variation- like being gold or something.

Alas, no brooms were around.  I drove slowly and stared out the window.  The dog panted down the back of my neck.  I fantasized about alien abductions and anal probes.  (I'm a freak- what can I say?)

I saw a strikingly handome yew that was in tree form.  Most pacific yews are more shrub-like in form.  Really old specimens can grow into small trees.  This one had an almost Christmas-tree-like shape.  I stopped the car and backed up to admire it.

Something from the left extreme of my peripheral vision caught my eye.  I'm not sure how I ever saw it...

There was a bright yellow broom in the top of another yew tree- right next to the road.  I stopped and got out to look at it.

Every time you find something like this, it seems like there is this delay in terms of emotional response.  You look at it, sort of numb.  You wonder if you accidentally took some LSD or mushrooms and you forgot about it.  After a few moments it sinks in, and the feeling is hard to describe.  For me, I guess I feel enraptured...  as though I've been briefly dialed in to what life really should be like.  True love comes to those who deserve it.  Fairies wait on every toadstool.  My boss is torn open by rabid wolves every morning.

Anyhow, I got out the GPS and marked the location.  I never have trouble finding plants again, but I always mark their location, just in case.  I've tried leaving ribbons  but some douche-bag always comes along later and removes them.  GPS coordinates are the deal.

 A month later, my dad and  my uncle came to visit. I needed to get cuttings, since it was the right time to do so (early fall)  I decided to drag them up into the mountains and show them the Taxus thickets and old growth Doug fir.

 I was in the most horrible of mental states.  My job was in the process of exploding.  This is a subject for another blog.  For now, lets just say that I had been fucked in the ass so hard by my employer that I wasn't sure that I'd ever be able to shit again without losing a pint of blood.

Being in that old growth forest with its unusual Taxus thicket was exactly what the doctor ordered.  I was more calm than I had been in weeks.  I showed my relatives some of the local landmarks, and then we went to collect cuttings from the tree.  I had a pole pruner.  The broom was maybe 12 to 15 feet up in the very top of the tree.

Here's a picture of the branch that came down.

Holy shit.  From the ground, it just looked like a yellow blob.  Up close, it was better than I could have hoped for.  Bright yellow needles with a green stripe down the middle.  Glowing, gold twigs.

I stuck about 60 cuttings that night while my dad, my uncle and I sat out on the patio by a fire.

It is now February, and I'm still waiting for those god damned cuttings to root.  I know they will- Taxus is a very easy genus to propagate.  (Even if the cuttings fail, most of the broom is still up there in the woods, so I can take a few more.)

  I have fantasies about gold hedges, adorned with coral-red fruits- fertilized by my ex-boss's blood.

Just to prove that I'm not a monster...

This is a variegated Chimaphila umbellifera that lives up near Mt. Hood in Oregon.  As much as I would have loved to propagate this little gem, it is reputedly so difficult to grow that I left it where it was.  I do plan to go visit it anytime I'm in its neighborhood, however :)  This species is circumboreal, though different subspecies are found here versus in Eurasia.  It has complex micorrhizal relationships with companion plants, so transplanting it is almost guaranteed to fail.

I stumbled upon this one in an area that had several interesting mutations- all within a few hundred yards of each other.  Was there some odd radiation event?  Evil spirits?  Too much Mumford and Sons played on a stereo at a nearby campground?   I am very curious about this little area, and I plan to spend some more time there this year.  Maybe I'll get vitiligo, myself...

Variegations are one of the most common mutations that I see out in the woods- the other one being dwarfism to varying degrees.  Once you start to develop an eye for them, you start to see that they are not as rare as you might think...

Wait... this wasn't as potty-mouthed as my title suggests.  Fuck.

Well, I suppose that I should start this blog with a confession of my ugliest plant sin.  Whenever I see this picture, I feel a stab of guilt.  I killed this plant- probably one in a million.  

I'm a total bastard.

For years, my friend Janet had been raving about a variegated Veratrum viride that she'd seen with friends in the Cascade Mountains of Washington.  In late June of 2011, we decided to see if we could find it.  Her sense of direction and memory of places and place names isn't particularly solid, so I was not particularly hopeful.

As we wound through a paved forest service road at about fourth thousand feet in elevation, we caught glimpses of Lilium columbianum here and there.  We stopped briefly to check out some Calochortus subalpinus by a road sign- truly lovely.  The overstory changed from Douglas fir to Abies amabalis - probably with some A. procera mixed in.

Abruptly, we turned a corner to find a three-foot-deep snowdrift covering the road.  Cursing, I walked out on the drift for a hundred yards or so to peer around the corner. There was no way that we'd get through it.  After some of our usual bickering, we decided to head home and return in two weeks.


In July, we returned to find the drift gone.  A mile or two further up the road, however, yet more snow blocked our progress. This time, we were not to be deterred.  I still can't believe we didnt' get stuck up there, but we rammed through a nasty patchy of snow, slush and ice to make it through to the next patch of bare road.  We found the meadow that she had described, so I became more hopeful. (I also had to revise my opinion of Janet's memory and directional abilities.)  It was still covered in about a foot of snow, however, so we were going to have to try yet again.

Finally, in late July, we were back in the meadow at the right time.  The Vertatrums were a foot to three feet high- when the foliage is at its most exquisite stage.  Even typical plants without the variegation are pretty spectacular- they have broad, pleated leaves that are quite dramatic.  I can't believe more people don't grow these in their gardens.  Maybe it has something to do with them being violently poisonous and teratogenic or something...  In fact, a sister species, Veratrum californicum, is being investigated as a chemotherapy drug.  It has an alkaloid in it called cyclopine- named for its tendency to create cyclops lambs if the ewes eat the plant  during particular stages of pregnancy.  Seriously poisonous shit...

The meadow covers maybe ten acres, so we began searching for the variegated individual.  She remembered that it had been located on the South edge of the meadow, so that is where we concentrated our search.  It didn't take long.

You just don't expect to see something so strikingly unnatural right there in the middle of the regular Northwest summer greenery.  It jumped out at me...  the creamy yellow stripes were absolutely luminous.  I stood speechless for a second- Janet was a few yards away.

"Uh," was all I managed to say.

She came over and marveled at how it had not changed at all in the seven years since she'd seen it last.  That indicated to me that it was probably a pretty stable variegation.  (Many such variegations prove unstable in cultivation and revert to regular green in a few years.)

It pains me to talk about having dug it- in fact I don't think I can deal with describing that part.  In retrospect, I should have waited until fall when it was dormant.  I should have potted it up differently, kept it much more moist, and babied the hell out of it.  At the time, it seemed best to put it in the garden, where its roots would be kept cool by being down in the soil versus being in some container.

It was fine for perhaps a month.  Then there was a hot spell of maybe 100 degrees.  I remember going out one morning to see the foliage totally dead.  I assumed that it had simply gone dormant- they do that in the summer, after all.

The next spring, I waited anxiously for the striped leaves to begin poking up through the soil.  They never did.  Honestly, I tell you- I feel gross just writing this.


I suppose that some readers will instantly take a righteous conservationist stance and aim their disgust at me for being a pillaging, patriarchal so-and-so.  After all, "If everyone went out there and dug stuff up, just think of the mess we would have!"  Whatever.  This isn't a rare species, by any stretch.  In my view, digging a plant like that carries a risk of its death...  it also carries with it the chance that such a sublime mutant will find its way into our gardens.  Not enough of our native plants are grown- and spectacular forms like this would go a long way toward promoting interesting native plant gardening.

With all of that said...  this remains my single greatest plant sin.  I killed this unique freak of nature.  Sometimes I go out and stare at that little pad of soil in my garden- all of the little herbs that came with it- the Mitellas and the impossible Erythronium montanum- are still alive and come up to torment me in the spring. 

And so...  somehow, despite my ugly, mechanistic world-view...  I will find a way to make it up to you, my precious, slain beauty.