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.

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.