Sasquatch Love

"I wonder if I'll get raped by a Sasquatch?" I mused aloud as my nephew and I walked into the subalpine forest.

"They are supposed to smell horrible," he said.

I suspect he believes in such creatures.  I do not, but I enjoy the goofy drama of it all.

Our goal was to reach that same high point in Washington that I was trying to get to in Impending Divorce.  In mid-august, they lock the gate, so we had to walk in.  There is yet another gate that they lock in December, so any conifers that I could find up that far would be really tough to get to.  It would take five or six miles on snowshoes to get to the upper gate.  Just getting to these trees in the winter is the hardest thing.

My nephew is a smoker, so our progress toward the remote peak was significantly hampered by his hiking ability.  (Just so you know...  if you have trouble keeping up with your fat-ass uncle who is twice your age...  you might want lay off the cigarettes.)  We made it a little farther up the mountain that I did on my last try, but we didn't make it to the peak- not even close :(

No brooms or other mutants were found that day- until we came back out.

I had sort of noticed this tree on the way in, but we were in the middle of joking around about Bigfoot.  On the way out, I got a clear view of it.

It is an Engelmann spruce with a very unusual branching pattern.  It looks like an arboreal octopus, with branches coming out at odd angles.

I'm going to try hiking to it in the next few weeks, to see if I can successfully graft it in the fall.  I've heard that this works, but the percentage of successful grafts is lower.

Wish me luck!

Twayblades

There are lots of orchids that are native to temperate forests.  Some are showy, like Cypripedium and Calypso orchids.  Others are much more subtle.  In order to really appreciate them, you have to get down on your hands and knees.  It wasn't until I became a hard-core plant geek that I began to really appreciate (relish) the value of undomesticated plants without the gawdy flowers that fill commercial nurseries.  After a while, the large-flowered, mass-produced shit that you see at garden centers starts to look cheap and trashy.  But when you take the time to look around you, you can sometimes find botanical gems that other people walk right past.

The twayblades- in genus Listera- are such plants.  Most of the species are very similar to each other- tiny plants only a few inches tall.  Leaves and flowers alike are an almost translucent lime green.  I took a picture of these on our family property.  I've tried growing them in my garden before, but the slugs think they are delicious.  Perhaps I should try growing them in a pot.  That way I could protect them from slugs.  I could also put them on a table while they bloom and enjoy their understated beauty close up.

I believe that the plants in this picture are Listera convallarioides.  I don't see this plant often, but when I do it is in shady, moist woods.  They seem to spread and form colonies- though I suppose that could be from seed as well.

So on your next hike or walk in the woods, pay close attention to the small green plants on the forest floor.  Delicate and beautiful treasures could well be at your feet.

A rare seedling

Dad and I plant trees every year on our property.  He does more of it than I do, since I am only up there visiting him for a week during the tree planting season.  We buy our seedlings from a nursery called Plants of the Wild.  Every year, we plant a couple of thousand seedlings of various native conifers.  Whenever we make the drive to Plants of the Wild to pick up the trees, I find myself wishing that I could spend a few hours looking through their seedlings.

In my own experience with growing native plants from seed, I've found a few cool things like that variegated Lonicera.  My thought is that mutations that might not survive in the wild are much more likely to make it in cultivation.  If you could look through thousands of seed-grown plants, you'd be more likely to find interesting mutants than if you spent the same amount of time looking out in the woods.

This year, I asked Dad to carefully watch the seedlings that he plants, just in case an interesting one was in there.


He called me a couple of weeks later to tell me about a spruce with yellow branches.  I asked him to pot it up and save it for me.

The pale branches have burned a little in the sun, but the ones with both green and yellow/white needles seem to be ok.  I will need to watch this plant for a while and see what develops.  It might just revert to green, or I might be able to select some variegated branches out of it for a new cultivar.  As always, only time will tell.

The moral of the story, of course, is that one must always keep an eye out for mutants- they are everywhere! 

Another weeper

I found yet another weeping form of Picea engelmannii.  It is pretty remote, so I will have to try propagating it in the fall.  I'm going to try doing that instead of the insane snow mobile trips that I've done in the past.

The structure of the trunk of this tree is kind of interesting.  It is forked, and the right fork has quite a curve where it branches away from the left one.  I wonder if this is related to the pendulous habit...  or if it is just from snow damage years ago.

Is it a good sign that my response to this is, "Oh.  Another weeping spruce."?  I don't feel like I should be taking interesting trees like this for granted- but there seems to be an overabundance of weeping forms.  I think that the best course of action is to propagate them all and observe them in cultivation.  It is amazing how much a plant can change when you get it in the garden.

Now I just have to find one that is variegated and weeping...

Why I Hate This

At least I got to see this moose.  She looks like she got into it with some kind of predator in the past- she's got some pretty serious scars.

I spent the day driving around the woods looking for brooms and whatever other mutants I might find.  I was still getting over a pretty bad cold, so I wasn't able to walk very far.  I'd borrowed my dad's truck, which was not working well.  The muffler had come parially loose, and change in pressure in the exhaust system was making the computer wig out.  It died every time I let up on the accelerator.  Annoying.

I think I got spoiled last year.  I found a number of things without really spending much time at it.  This year, I I think I'm making up for it in the luck department.  I didn't see so much as a broom caused by disease.

Days like this make me wonder why I keep doing this.  It is frustrating and I really start to hate it sometimes.  Of course, I know why I do it- and why people do things like gambling.  Back in grad school, I had some coursework on behavior managment.  And as an undergrad, I had certainly learned plenty about Behaviorism.  There is something especially compelling about an intermittent reward schedule.  If you can't predict when you are going to get a hit, you just keep mashing that button in the box.  I feel very much like one of Skinner's rats.  When you win, it sure feels good.  You are filled with the sense that you are doing something truly fulfilling and good.

When no reward comes from pushing the button, however, it is maddening.  Who knows.  Maybe it really isn't worth it.  When I feel like this, I remind myself that any time spent out in the forest is not wasted.  I try to relax and enjoy my time out there.  Even if I don't find any botanical treasure, I often get to see wildlife like the moose.

Besides knowing that I'm being hooked by an intermittent reward schedule, I'm also aware of how my human brain tries to form patterns and predict events that are truly random.  Our brains just do this.  Over the eons, most people have unaware that our brains do this, and we get a plethora of irrational beliefs and superstitions as a result.

Some examples in this case are the superstitions about witch's brooms themselves.  In the old days in Europe, people believed that brooms were caused by witches landing in the trees.  More recently, among broom hunters, you can sometimes encounter similarly irrational beliefs.  Some people think that brooms are more common in cemeteries.  In my own anecdotal experience, this just hasn't been true.  It also just reeks of quaint superstition.

We have pretty cool brains that struggle to make sense of an unpredictable world.  As I'm driving or hiking around looking for plants, I can feel my brain generating irrational ideas about how to predict the next cool find.  There is an urge to believe that I can magically manifest something by wishing it to be so.  Sometimes I find myself imagining that my chances of finding a mutation increase with every trip to the woods.  (The latter is such a common fallacy that it has a name- the Gambler's Fallacy.)

Ultimately, I know these thoughts are pretty much bullshit.  They give my brain something to do while I'm staring at an ocean of green foliage, though.  And it gives me a chance to observe my own primate brain doing what it does.  By spending time in the woods letting my irrational thoughts just run, I feel like I get to know myself better.  I like to think that I can carry this insight into other parts of my life.  By knowing how my mind tries to form irrational beliefs, I might be able to avoid making mistakes in my thinking in other areas.

Regret

I caught sight of this spectacularly weeping Engelmann spruce from the highway in northern Washington.  It was standing alone in a field, so it really stood out.  I am guessing that whomever cleared the trees in that field noticed this unusual tree and spared it.

The following winter, I stopped by a house across the road to try to find out who the owner was.  A woman answered the door.  I was nervous- you never know how people are going to react to you when you want to shoot a tree on their property.  The lady knew exactly which tree I was talking about, and she seemed curious about what I wanted to do.  She yelled to her husband inside the house to see if he had any objection to me shooting twigs out of their spruce.  He did not, so I went across the road to the tree.

There was snow on the ground- maybe a couple of feet.  It was a little bit difficult to get over the barbed wire fence- though not as hard as it was wading in the chest-deep powder that you'd find at higher elevations.  I shot several twigs out of the tree and collected about 20 cones that had fallen onto the snow.

Only one seed from the cones germinated, but it died a few days later.  Two of the grafts took, however.  Now I must observe the grafted trees for a decade or two to see if this form can be duplicated by grafting.

I have decided to name this tree 'Regret', since it seems sad- albeit in a dramatic and spectacular way.

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?