Sky Blue

In Scotland, they call these bluebells.  My mom's family is Scots-Irish, so I like to think that I grew up calling these flowers bluebells because of the oral tradition.  That's actually kind of likely.

Campanula rotundifolia is a circumboreal species.  In the US, they are more commonly called Harebells.  I grew up seeing them scattered through the Eastern Washington landscape in open woodlands.  As an adult, I encountered them in cultivation in a botanical garden where I used to work.  In cultivation, they can grow into floriforous beauties that you'd never see in the wild.

The color of typical plants is a darker blue than this plant.  I found and collected this pale blue specimen from my dad's property, from the side of a hill where lightning repeatedly destroyed trees when I was growing up.

I'm not sure what to call this clone.  Should I go with "Sky Diamonds" or "Blue Lightning"?

At any rate, I'm quite captivated by its unusual hue.  It took me a few times to get it started in cultivation (I took small starts each time), but this year I have a trough full of it.  The season is early, but it looks like it is preparing for a spectacular show.

Impending Divorce

I've been interested in finding the highest places in the mountains of Eastern Washington.  None of them quite rise above treeline, but a few come close.  One summer, maybe five years ago, a friend and I decided to try hiking in to one.  It is 7300 feet tall, which is the highest place in Washington outside of the Cascades.

His wife wanted to come.  She hates hiking.  I think that it was because she didn't want her husband to be alone with me.  Whatever.

After a two hour drive up to the woods, our way was blocked by a logging operation.  Contractors had set up a high-line operation.  In fact, you can still see the skid trails from that on Google Earth.  We had to park a couple of miles downhill from the trailhead.  (In reality, no trail goes up to that peak- we would have had to cut across the wilds and bushwack our way up there.)

My friend and his wife bickered the entire way up that road.  It was uncomfortable.  It was actually kind of miserable- and I was left wishing that I'd gone up there alone.  It is grizzly country, though.  At least their constant fighting probably scared off the bears.

We didn't make it far that day.  They were not prepared for the kind of hike that I was planning- and I was not prepared for the loud arguments that they were willing to have in front of me.  Just before we turned around to go home, I found a Lonicera utahensis- the Utah Honeysuckle- in fruit.  The fruits look like red Gummy Bears- kind of translucent and bright red.  They bring back memories of my early childhood.  One grew near my house, and I always wondered at those bright, double berries.

I collected the fruits for the seed.

Out of three seedlings, one was variegated.  I decided to name it Lonicera utahensis 'Impending Divorce'

Here's a picture of what it looked like after 4 years.

Some variegated plants will continually revert to green foliage, and you just have to keep pruning out the normal growth in order to maintain the unusual foliage.  While it was still too young to know for sure, I was beginning to suspect that 'Impending Divorce' was a plant like this.  Not long after this picture was taken, I pruned off some green twigs.

A week later, the plant began to die.  Within two weeks, it was gone.  I think that it was killed by a pathogen such as a Phytophthora sp.- which probably gained a foothold in a new pruning wound.

I was heartbroken.

That plant had such potential.  I killed it- or, rather, another organism did.  It makes me wonder what kind of botanical marvels have never lived long enough to be propagated.

Oh yeah...  my friend and his wife divorced not long after.

Most Often, No Quarry is Found

If I keep posting about my discoveries, you will all think that I just go out and find a new plant the moment I get out of the car.

This is not the case.  I typically find a couple of things per year.  Some years, of course, are better than others.  It mostly depends on how much time I am able to spend out in the woods.  

Oddly enough, last year was pretty productive, despite me not having a functional car.  I estimate that I only spent a total of 4 days out searching- yet I found a handful of conifers worth propagating.  Of those...  it remains to be seen how many will be worth growing.  Only time will tell.

None of this is to say that a fruitless plant foray is devoid of rewards.  Being out in the forests in the Northwest is reward enough in itself.  Even in their most boring and non-mutated forms, our native plants are worth appreciating.  I have a fondness for unusual habitats such as wetlands and subalpine forests and meadows.  The plants that inhabit these places can be significantly more exotic-seeming than the typical, lowland forests of Douglas fir and swordferns.  

Several years ago in North Idaho, I bushwacked a couple of miles into older secondary growth forest to find a tiny lake.  I knew that it was a peat bog, so carnivorous plants would be likely denizens.

I have one picture that I know came from that trip.  This tiny plant is Moneses uniflora.  It used to be included in the family Ericaceae (blueberries, heathers, Rhododendrons, etc) but has since been moved to Pyrolaceae, along with other diminutive wintergreens.

This is a plant that I'd read about before encountering it.  On this trip, my nephew and I set out in search of the tiny lake.  We traversed a forest filled with rotting logs, downed trees, and general decay.  Clearly, the area had not been logged or burned in decades.  Moss grew thick on the forest floor and in the trees.  As we approached the lake from downstream, we first encountered the beaver dam.  Beyond that, mats of grass on floating peat islands were split by dark, menacing openings into the lake below.  There was remarkably little open water.  Most of the surface was covered in vegetation.  On the far end of the lake, I stumbled upon these two Moneses flowers.

According to "Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia and the Inland Northwest" by Robert Parish, these plants are considered powerful medicine by the Haida.  Even from my perspective as an atheist Westerner...  these plants are something special.  Though they are not that rare, I feel as though I've been blessed when I see them.

Anyhow...  my point is that being out in the woods is magical enough without finding the rare mutation.  My strange little hobby carries me into magical (if a bit muddy and sloppy) places that many people will never see.

Not all plant finds turn out to be wonderful additions to the horticultural pallet.

This Douglas fir, for example...  

I was a special ed teacher for several years.  I had a class full of kids with high functioning autism and Asperger Syndrome.  As part of our weekly routine, we would go to the local coffee shop on Friday mornings.  I always swore to coworkers that if the district ever took away those coffee trips, I would quit.  One year, they closed my classroom and moved me to a school where I couldn't do those coffee trips.

When I swear, I fucking mean it, bitches.

I quit that motherfucking job.  (It is, of course, much more complicated than those little coffee trips- but the loss of that time to enjoy the company of those kids factored in heavily.  They were some of the coolest people I've had the pleasure of knowing.)

I digress.  Every Friday, about half-way to the coffee shop, I would check out this sickly little Doug fir seedling in the landscaping of an apartment complex.  Finally one spring, one of my assistants finally said "Oh, just dig it up already.  It is going to get pulled out by the landscape maintenance people."

Yeah...  like I need encouragement to do that.

We had the kids walk ahead so they wouldn't know what I was doing- I didn't want to set a bad example, after all.  Of course... we are talking about pretty sharp kids here- I think they all knew exactly what I did.  I can't remember what I used to get it out of the soil- it wasn't that big, so I didn't need to dig that deeply.  I guzzled the rest of my mocha and stashed it in the paper cup.

This pic was taken about a year after I had collected it.  I babied it and kept it in the shade, which prevented the white/yellow coloring from being expressed.  it looked like a normal green doug fir.  The year of this picture, I moved it out into the sun, where the light bleached out the chlorophyll and produced what you see here.  I was convinced that I had discovered the plant of the century.  Imagine an 80-foot-tall specimen of this thing in your yard...

Alas, as the sun heated up that summer, I found out that the plant couldn't actually tolerate the sun- even for the cool morning hours.  This is why it had looked so sickly and white in the landscaping of the apartment complex.

Since then... the little tree has continued to be a sickly little mutant.  I still like it, and I'll keep it around because I know what it is like to be a freak that no one likes.  <whimper>

Some of us freaks don't grow up to be trophy wives or husbands...  and some of us don't grow up to be resplendent chartreuse trees that light up suburban apartment complexes.  

We still deserve to live, though.  Just like I deserve to have a job where I get paid to take smart, quirky kids to coffee every Friday.