Fine Gold

As we left the meadow containing the Phlox, I caught site of the Abies grandis above. The bright yellow new growth really stood out.  I had Dad stop the truck and I waded out through the tansy to have a closer look.  My feet got wet as I crossed the creek in the middle of the meadow.  I was wearing shorts, and my legs got very itchy from contact with the tansy and other herbs.

Up close, I noticed that only the top half of the tree had the gold foliage.  The very top had some dead twigs in it, which could have either indicated sun burn from gold foliage or else death from disease.  At this point, I am not leaning in either direction.  Maybe someone with more experience would have a better idea- but from my perspective, I'm guessing that there is a 50% chance that it is in the process of dying (its close neighbor is already dead) and a 50% chance that it is a cool mutation.

I think I'll go back next year at about the same time to see what the tree looks like.  I don't want to try propagating it unless I have a better idea of whether it is worthwhile.  The bonus is that I'll get to visit the rare Phlox in bloom again :)

If it does turn out to be a good one, could you imagine this contrast of color in your yard?   

Extinction

This post is about an endangered species.  Since much of my blog is about collecting mutants, let me make something very clear at the beginning here.  As I've stated before, I do not collect rare plants.  When I visited this plant last weekend, I took nothing but photographs.  (I think that most of you would already know that- I just want to avoid having anyone get weird and accuse me of something.)

The Clearwater River in Idaho is home to forests of Taxus brevifolia, the Pacific Yew.  In that area, the yews comprise the dominant forest species.  Everywhere else in its range, the Pacific Yew is a minor component of forests.  Ever since I read about that, I've been wanting to go visit.  I suspect that there are wonderful brooms to be found...  perhaps ones even cooler than the golden one I found last year.  

In my readings, and through conversations with people familiar with the area, I learned that there are a handful of endemic species in there.  Apparently, the deep canyons in that watershed served as refugia during the last ice age.  While species froze out elsewhere, some were able to hang on in there until the ice sheet and glaciers retreated.  One such species is Phlox idahonis.  Since I love exploring wetlands, I was highly interested in seeing this plant in the wild.  It is very, very rare, living in three or four wet meadows in a very tiny area.

I did a number of Google image searches to see what it looked like.  Not many images are available.  One person had a fairly nice shot of the flowers- claiming that he could tell you where the plant was, but then he'd have to kill you.  

Such melodramatics might have had more weight if I hadn't been able to find directions to exactly where the plant grew in about 10 minutes.  There are published papers, describing the process of monitoring the populations.  Happily, this plant is a fairly plain cousin to our gawdy garden hybrids, so I imagine that there is basically zero collection pressure.

For comparison, try doing a search of the following three plants- all three are roughly the same in terms of rarity:

Phlox idahonis

Sarracenia oreophila

Nepenthes clipeata

You'll notice that not only is there are whole lot more material on the latter two, but there are significant conservation efforts underway.  Those plants are under significant collection pressure.  In the case of the Sarracenia, which grows in Tennessee, you will most assuredly not find directions to its wetland abodes.  I'll have more to say on that in a bit.  (Oh, and Nepenthes clipeata grows in a remote area of Borneo.  You could find out exactly where it is pretty easily- but good luck driving to it!)

Dad told me that he had always been curious about that area.  A family friend had worked in the logging operations that cleared the land for the Dworshak reservoir, and he had often spoken of how beautiful it was down there.  Last Sunday, we decided to take the drive.  

It took forever.

The most striking feature of the land there is how deep the river canyons are.  We are talking a couple of thousand feet deep.   At the lower elevations, dryland vegatation is dominant- with forests of Pinus ponderosa.  As we drove along the river, I tried to imagine the landscape 12 thousand years ago.  The plateau above was probably tundra and snowfields, while the bottoms of the canyons were green- filled with fir and the kind of vegetation that we see at higher elevations today.  

We climbed out of the canyon again and headed up into farm country, then montane forest.  The road was paved nearly the entire way.  Finally, we turned off the paved road and went a few miles down a gravel road.  It gradually petered out into a small dirt road with a dead end.  When I got out of the truck, I spotted the Phlox in about 10 seconds.  Our trip was well-timed, as the plants were in full bloom.  The foliage looks similar enough to other upright Phlox species that I could have recognized it out of bloom, but it would have taken some careful searching.

I looked around the meadow a bit.  Eurasian exotics such as Centauria maculosa and Tanacetum vulgare were colonizing the area.  These are the botanical equivalents of the Borg from Star Trek, or maybe the aliens from the Ridley Scott films.  In other words, they are bad-ass mother-fucking invasives from hell.  The Centauria didn't seem to tolerate the wet conditions that the Phlox prefered, but the Tanacetum was right in there, choking the life out of it.    

This disturbed me greatly.  While people are out there carefully cutting brush away from carnivorous plant habitats and jealously guarding the über-secret locations of their populations...  this plain-looking little Phlox is languishing in a meadow with redneck pickup tracks and invasive weeds.  

So much of our attention as humans is directed to the pretty, the exotic, and the cosmetically pleasing.  Hobbyists righteously crusade to save plants that are far less imperiled than this one, but that have more aesthetic appeal.  In short, nobody gives a shit about a spindly little Phlox that lives in Idaho.  It doesn't eat bugs, or have ridiculously large, beautiful flowers or leaves.  And it certainly doesn't have the stately, otherworldly presence that certain species of owl have.

I've been thinking a lot about this plant- and my relationship to it as a human.  I have plenty to say about that, actually, though I'm not sure today is the day to say it.  

What I will offer- as a question/ food for thought...  This species, and others like it, were likely in severe decline before humans arrived in North America- let alone by the time European settlers showed up.  Extinctions happen.  The vast majority of species that have lived on earth are now extinct.  Only a tiny, tiny minority survive- or rather, their descendants survive- the slow, grinding algorithm that is natural selection.  

I doubt that we are going to be the ultimate cause of this plant's extinction, though it seems pretty clear that Eurasian exotics (our fault) are going to finish kicking its poor butt out the door.  This makes me sad.  But to expand that sadness into some grand statement about the natural order of things is, at best, deluded.  The Phlox itself is incapable of suffering, or of any thought at all.  There is no larger order to be offended or violated.  Likewise, there is no god-given right to kill and exploit.

The real issue here isn't so much one of right and wrong- of following some imaginary moral code-  as much as deciding what kind of world we want to live in.  Do we want to eat and displace most other species, and let our grandchildren inherit a world of rats, cockroaches, algae, spotted knapweed and tansy?  Do we want to preserve some of the molecular kaleidoscope that we were born into so that future generations can see it?  Should we try to approximate what the world would look like before we evil primates showed up and spoiled the magical and fictional Eden?   (My vote is for the kaleidoscope option, btw.)

Ultimately, I think that as our species continues to grow into the role of caretaker of this planet, we will need to grapple with these ideas.  Anyone who claims to have the corner on truth and moral certainty with these issues is full of shit.  

I hope that made sense.  It has been a long week and I'm very tired- but I wanted to get a post ready on time, especially since I saw some cool stuff to share.

Oh, and by the way- I still haven't made it to the fork of the river where the yew trees are.  I wish that I could spend my days wandering the woods.

Golden Boughs

Sorry for the shitty picture.  One of these days I should take a photography class or something.  That takes money, however...  and since I no longer have a predictable income, I can't splurge on such things.  It is hard to get rich as a substitute teacher.

The boughs I'm talking about are on the grand fir (the tree on the right in the picture.)  There were several bright yellow branches on this tree- bright enough that I was able to see them while going by at 45 miles per hour.

My dad was driving, as usual.  I had him pull over and back up.  The tree was right next to some power lines, and the gold branches were about 60 feet up.  I had no idea how I would get to them.

Dad had a neighbor who worked as an arborist.  The next January, we stopped in to see if we could talk him into climbing the tree.  It soon became apparent that the man was a blow-hard.  He talked non-stop for a good hour, espousing the full compliment of anti-government conspiracy theories that seem to be prevalent up there in the woods.  I wanted to get to the door and escape, but my dad was sitting there politely listening.  I was just waiting for him to start into some kind of creepy anti-gay rhetoric (I'm a gay guy, so I was starting to get a little nervous) but he never got around to that.

We eventually got around to planning a time to go get pieces from the tree.  The guy was going to have his son meet us and climb the tree.

On the way out the door, he shook my hand and said, "You know, you're a good-sized man.  I like you.  I like a good-sized man."

What in the fuck did that mean?  Was it some kind of weird redneck come-on?  Did it mean that he wanted to take me out back, tie me to the tractor and cut me into pieces?  Have a romantic encounter in the hay barn?  Both options seemed equally ghastly, so I was glad to get in the truck and head back down the driveway.

Of course, no one was home a few days later when we were supposed to meet the son and get the scions from the tree.  It was at that point that I decided that I needed to learn to climb trees myself.

The following winter, Dad and I happened to stop by when the owner of the property was home.  It actually turned out to be someone that Dad knew, so he gave me permission to shoot some twigs out.

It took about four shots, but I got a few pieces.  In this picture, you can see one of the variegated twigs, complete with damage from the shot from the gun.  Most of the buds were fine, so a little needle damage didn't matter that much.  At least one of them took- the buds are breaking as I write this.

I've been told that irregular variegations like this are unpredictable.  The only way to find out if it is stable is to grow it out for several years.  It might continue to throw out yellow branches here and there throughout the tree, or it may simply revert to green.

The waiting will probably drive me nuts.  I suppose that the only thing to be done about that is to go out and find more plants to obsess about this summer.

No- That's Mistletoe!

Virtually anyone who works in the timber industry has been trained to see any abnormality in trees as pathology.

I've talked to foresters and loggers about brooms (could you imagine a better profession to be in, as a plant hunter?  You'd probably see more mutated branches and whole trees than anyone else.)  Their universal response is to tell me that brooms are caused by dwarf mistletoe- a smaller relative of the familiar yuletide ornament.

There are a handful of species of dwarf mistletoe Arceuthobium sp- native to the Northwest- each specific to a host species.  True firs and spruce are not affected by them, but they have their own sets of diseases...

Dwarf mistletoe does, in fact, cause brooms- millions of them.  When I first began hunting for brooms, I wondered how you could ever tell the difference.  After a while, however, it became abundantly obvious.  Brooms caused by dwarf mistletoe are sloppy, disorganized, and rarely isolated.  The seeds of the mistletoe spread all over the neighboring trees (as well as around the original host tree), so you don't usually see a mistletoe broom in isolation.  Their general form doesn't look like something you'd want growing in your garden, either.

One time, at a local nursery, I noticed some  Arceuthobium growing in a wild-collected Pinus contorta var murrayana.  It had caused a bit of a broom- which is how I noticed it.  I could actually see twigs of the Arceuthobium sticking out of the trunk.  I told the cranky person at the information desk and he shrugged it off.  It apparently doesn't bother them to sell diseased plants.

Anyhow, I occasionally run across brooms that are clearly pathological in nature, but are in trees that are not susceptible to Arceuthobium infections. I'm guessing that they are caused by fungi like rusts, or perhaps by viruses.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter- I'm not going to waste my time with propagating them.  If you try grafting a broom caused by a disease, the scion will not survive very long.

Below are examples of such brooms in a spruce, a subalpine fir, and a grand fir.

Sometimes, though, you can't quite tell if the broom is healthy or not.  It may not be big enough yet for you to see its habit clearly- or part of it may have died from being shaded out.  I do propagate these brooms.  Below is a picture of such a broom in a Pinus contorta var latifolia tree.  One of these winters I need to climb it to get scions.

So, the next time you are out in the woods, be sure to look up.  If you find a broom that looks like a neat and tidy little dwarf tree, chances are you have a keeper.  If it looks like an ugly mess, you probably don't.

I think of these brooms as fool's gold on my treasure hunts.  I get excited when I see them- but only until I get a closer look.  Although it can be frustrating, I think that it makes the whole process that much more interesting and exciting.



For information on the Arceuthobium species, I referred to the US Forest Service's Silvics Manual

Take Three

Last summer, I went back over the pass to have a look at the broom again.  The damage from the 16 gauge from two years prior was apparent.  I was a amazed that it took that much damage and didn't drop many twigs.  I was once again struck by the unique form of this broom- I had to propagate it!

This past winter, I had planned to go up with Galen in late December.  Much to my frustration, those plans fell through.  The snow mobile had been sitting in the shop since March, but the mechanic still hadn't done the work on it.  We rescheduled for January 19th- during the long weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Since my job had been destroyed this year, I had a much more flexible schedule.  I was working as a substitute and a tutor, so I was much more able to take off an extra day.  Of course, I had a much more restricted budget because of this...

My uncle, figuring that the mechanic might not get the sled finished in time, asked a friend of a friend to go up in there with me.  It turns out that the friend of a friend was a photographer who is always looking for new winter scenery to shoot.  His name is Don Sewell- you should totally check out his web page.

Don took the picture above- it helps to have a photographer along who knows what he's doing :)

The weekend finally arrived.  Galen had to cancel, but he let me use his snow mobile.  We met the Don and his brother in law out on the highway, and headed up to the pass.  I was a bit nervous about heading into the frozen, drug-trafficker-killing wilderness with two people that I didn't know.  It turned out that they were friendly and easy to talk to, so I needn't have worried.

At several points along the road up, Don stopped to take shots of the creek, snow-covered fir saplings, and odd snow formations.  Eventually, we rounded the mountain and came out on the south-facing slope.  The sun was shining, sparkling through the millions of ice crystals that had grown on the top of the snow.  The whole scene was both blinding and breath-taking.

On the way up, I missed the broom- it is easier to see when you are coming down.  We reached the top of the little pass, which was covered by a small avalanche.  The snowmobile track went right across it, so we kept going to get to a better place to turn around.  As I rode over the avalanche chute, I thought about the dead drug runner again.  It gave me the creeps.

We turned around, and I was able to find the broom easily.  I pulled my sled over to the side of the road, and began to psych myself up for the ugly climb ahead of me.  It took me perhaps a half hour to climb the bank.  I had to use a fallen tree as a handrail of sorts.  When I finally got up to the top of the bank, Don threw me the gun.  He and his brother-in-law left to explore for a bit as I made my way up to the tree.

The snow was very dry and powdery.  In most places, I sank right through it- up to my chest.  Progress was agonizingly slow.  I had to fight the urge to give up, oddly enough.  I had traveled several hundred miles, coordinated elaborate plans with several people to get access to the machine and some people to go up there with me...  but I had forgotten how utterly impossible it was to just get to the bottom of the tree.  It was beyond my abilities.  Too many years working at a desk, and too many evenings of eating pizza instead of going to the gym had taken their toll.  That, and the fact that I wasn't 25 anymore...

I remember thinking at that point that my own sense of defeat was my own worst enemy.  I stopped, rested for a bit, and then pushed onward.  It might take me all day, but I could get to the tree.

Eventually I did.  I shot the broom with a slug from the 12 gauge.  One of the little tops of the broom fell out.  I heard Don shout from below- he said that he should have taken an action shot of it.  The sizable piece of the broom had hung up in the branches of a neighboring white pine- the dead tree that you see to the left of the broom in the picture.  Only the top is dead- the bottom of the tree is very much alive with dense foliage.

I slowly worked my way around the base of the tree, trying to find a way to either shoot out another piece or free up the one I'd already blasted off.  I shot into the broom with buck shot, but it refused to let go of any twigs.  A fine spray of ice crystals erupted out of it with every shot.  I tried my remaining few slugs, but was unsuccessful.

I had Don throw me some more shot gun shells.  I had to work my way back down to the top of the bank, which was not so fun.

I had started to accept defeat when I reached the tree again.  It was just too impossible to get scions from this son of a bitch.  I positioned myself  where I could clearly see the piece that I had shot out earlier.  I proceeded to unload a couple of boxes of shells in a circular pattern around the branch, blasting away all of the branches the held it.  Finally, it came free.

When I got back to the sled, I was utterly spent.  We made our way back to the trucks below.  I was completely soaked with sweat and melting snow.  It was a good thing I was wearing wool.

We reached the trucks and parted ways.

When I got home, I grafted up pieces of the broom. I had planned in advance for this, and I had 30 rootstocks ready to go.  10 were grand fir and 20 of them were subalpine fir.

Now, six months later, only two of them have survived.  Both are on subalpine fir rootstocks.  Neither has started to grow yet- but I think that I can see the buds changing in color.  I hope that means that they are going to break soon.


As I was standing chest-deep in snow on that mountain, it became very clear to me that our limits may not be what we think they are.  Given sufficient motivation- be it plant lust or simple survival in a financial or physical sense- I think that we can go much further than we think we can.  In the snow up there, my greatest obstacle was my own sense of defeat.  Once I overcame the urge to give up (or, more accurately, just decided to tolerate the urge and push forward), I was able to complete a  physical task that seemed impossible.

The last year has been difficult for me in terms of my career.  I was forced out of a job that gave me a sense of purpose and meaning.  The resulting fallout was demoralizing, to put it mildly.  Saddled with a mortgage, I had to struggle to keep myself afloat with my income drastically reduced.

It sounds cheesy, but since that day in January, I've been able to think back on my experience with that tree in the mountains.  Propagating it has proved a formidable task.  Even now, my limited success isn't guaranteed.  Both of those grafts could still die, and I'd be back to square one.

I think that difficult times in life are very much like this quest.  Ridiculous obstacles can stand in your way, and you can feel like calling it quits.  I feel like my job situation has felt much like standing chest-deep in snow.  It isn't fair, it is hard, and I've had repeated setbacks.  But with determination and help from friends and Dad, I have been pushing forward.

My persistence will pay off.  My limits are not what they appear to be.

Freezing to Death

The following winter- actually, it was during spring break- a neighbor named Galen offered to help me get to the broom.  It was late march, but the snow was still deep in northern Washington.  Early on a Saturday morning, we headed up to the pass.  After unloading two snow mobiles, the neighbor and I started off on the road.

About a mile in, we found a car that had been abandoned in the middle of the road, buried in a couple of feet of snow.  It was a bit of a mystery.  We surmised that it had been there since the fall, since there was no way that you could get a car in there when there was snow on the ground.

At two miles in, Galen's machine broke down.  We fiddled with it for a few minutes, and then determined that it wouldn't be starting again.  Perhaps unwisely, I went on alone.

I don't have a lot of snow mobile experience.  The snow was melting and very soft (I later learned that no one goes up there that late in the year).  Things went well for the first several miles, though I had a growing sense of unease.  I was miles away from any other humans, and I would have trouble getting back out if there was trouble.  I did have snow shoes, but with every mile, I knew that getting out would be a marathon effort.

I have found that a trek like that is more emotionally taxing than it is physically.  We have fear of these situations for good reason.  A lone human in the wilderness is so vulnerable- to the elements, predators, and perhaps his own fears themselves.  

As I climbed onto the south-facing mountain slopes, the quality of the snow began to change significantly.  In the open spaces, the sun had melted much of the snow from the road- particularly next to the bank on the uphill side.  The snow was mounded in the center and sloped off to each side, creating a precarious and narrow level space for me to ride on.  If I'd been a more experienced and confident rider, I would have been able to power through the soft spots and keep going.  As it was, I slowed down and stayed on the inside edge of the crown of the road.  This caused me to slide down into the ditch on the inside edge of the road, burying the sled and getting it stuck.  

When you are alone, getting a sled unstuck is not an easy task.  I managed to get the sled unstuck and moving again three or four times.  Finally, I put on the snow shoes, determined to walk the last mile to the tree. 

After a few yards, my growing unease at the situation rose to an uncomfortable level.  If I manged to get to the tree, I'd still have to climb that brutal bank and wade through the snow to the tree.  It seemed unlikely to me that I'd be able to do the climb after I'd been yanking the snow mobile around by myself- not to mention a mile trek on snow shoes.  

Reluctantly, I turned back.  I hurt my back while turning the sled around.  I was disappointed, but I knew that I'd made the right choice.  If I got fatigued enough out there, I might not have the strength to get back to the sled quickly.  Despite my warm clothes, I was worried about hypothermia.  It would be too easy to die out there.

I rode back down to Galen, and we  towed his machine back to the trucks with a piece of rope.  

The border patrol was there in the parking lot.  Dad, who had been waiting there, said that the border patrol guy asked him who we all were and where we lived.  Apparently, there is an overland drug-smuggling route up there- and there are cameras and sensors up the road to monitor activity.  When they noticed us going up there at a weird time of year, they came out to check it out.  I learned that the car that we saw was from a drug-run gone bad.  Two men had gone in on a drug run and got stuck.  One walked out, while the other attempted to walk across the border.  The one who tried to make it across froze to death.

Knowing that someone had frozen to death in that area made me even more glad that I had the sense to come down when I did.

Oh, it isn't over yet... tune in next week to hear about yet another attempted to reach this god damned broom!

My Holy Grail

Of course, I might find a holier grail in the future...  but so far, this has been the best broom that I've found.  It is found a few miles south of Canada, in Northern Washington in a Subalpine Fir- Abies lasciocarpa.

A few years ago, my dad graciously agreed to drive while I sat in the back of the pickup, watching for brooms.  It was a narrow dirt road that wound through a mountain pass.  We had passed through forests of Douglas fir, Western White Pine, and Western Larch.  We started to get high enough that a few Subalpine Fir  were mixed in with the other species.    As we turned a corner, I just barely caught sight of a green mass off to my right.  We had passed it before I could really get a look at it.  I thumped on the rear window- the signal for Dad to stop.  As we backed up, the scene in the picture above came into view.

The broom looked like a cluster of miniature trees- a diminutive forest.  I scrambled up the bank to get a look at what I'd be facing when I came back to collect scions.  The bank was brutally steep- I could barely make it up.  Of course, it would be covered in several feet of snow when I returned.  Would that make it easier or more difficult to get up to the base of the tree?

I marked the location on my GPS, and we continued the drive over the pass.  One the way home, Dad and I discussed possibilities for retrieving scions.  At 5300 feet in elevation, the road would be snowed-in fairly early in the year.  It might be possible to drive up there at Thanksgiving in an unusually warm year- but most likely I'd be looking at renting a snowmobile.

When December rolled around, I called a company in Spokane that rented snow machines by the day.  I rented an ATV with tracks- a monster of a machine.  We picked it up in Spokane before hauling it up to the north country.

My nephew and I set out at about 10 in the morning.  It was an overcast day, and there were a few inches of fresh snow on the trees.  The tree was about 10 miles in from the plowed road, so it took us an hour or so to get in there.  That's when the real fun began.

I had thought that the bank was too steep when there was no snow.  That was nothing, compared to what it was like with several feet of snow on the ground.  At first, I tried to use snowshoes to climb, but it was far to steep for them to be useful.  I then resorted to wading in the snow- sinking in to my waist.

I wasn't really sure I could do it.  It was brutally difficult to get up to the top of the bank.  Then I had to make my way up the hill above that, which was almost as steep.  I had my nephew throw me the gun when I reached a stable spot.

After another half-hour of struggling, I was finally under the tree.  I lifted the 16 gauge to my shoulder and proceeded to empty a box of 20 shells into the broom.  Despite the fact that they were magnum loads, there was just not enough power to break off more than a couple of tiny twigs.  I was out of ammo and only had three or four pieces that I didn't think were useable.

Disappointed, we headed back down the pass.

When I got home, I grafted the tiny twigs onto some grand fir rootstocks.  They all died a few months later.

I was frustrated, but I became even more determined to propagate this tree.  It was just too cool-looking, and I had already put in too much effort to give up.  Next year, I'd take a bigger gun.