Mountain Plants of the Western Cascades

Posts Tagged ‘Cephalanthera’

Left: blooming phantom orchid in July. Right: developing seed capsules of a yellow spotted coralroot. These occur occasionally and are somewhat like albino versions. There are some near both trailheads at Heckletooth.

I hadn’t been to Heckletooth Mountain near Oakridge since 2016. It’s one of a very few sites I know in the area that has large-fruited lomatium (Lomatium macrocarpum), a plant I really wanted to try in my restoration area. I have a few plants on my property that came up from Heckletooth seeds sown years ago, but they are swamped by weedy grass and never bloom, so it was time to try again.

I always look in the woods on the summit ridge for a small population of Bald Mountain milkvetch (Astragalus umbraticus). It is endemic to southwestern Oregon, and, so far anyway, this is the most northerly extent of its range, so I am always happy to see it is still there and was in bloom in late June.

I headed up there on June 29. As on my first trip in 2016 (see Spring at Heckletooth Mountain), I went up the short gravel Road 207 off of Salmon Creek Road 24. The road was unexpectedly in terrible shape in 2016, but as close as it is to Oakridge, I thought for sure it would have been fixed by now. Not so. Once again, I couldn’t turn around the narrow road once I started up it. I was pretty stressed out when I reached the trailhead after negotiating a steep mile of washout. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t get much better. We’d had a few drops of rain in Fall Creek the day before—the last of the spring as it turned out—but here it had rained enough that everything was drenched, and the sun didn’t come out as the forecast had promised until after 2 pm when I was heading back. Most of the seeds that were ripe were quite wet, and it kept me from venturing off the trail at all. But some plants like the lovely leafy fleabane (Erigeron foliosus), some paintbrush (Castilleja sp.), and showy tarweed (Madia elegans) were still in bloom. And the gorgeous leaves of silver bush lupine (Lupinus albifrons) actually look their best when glistening with water droplets. Alas, the large-fruited lomatium wasn’t anywhere near ripe yet, although there was plenty of seed of the earlier blooming Hall’s lomatium (L. hallii). So I would have to return if I wanted the lomatium seed. Read the rest of this entry »

Sabine and I first discovered the Youngs Rock trail in December of 2004, while looking for a sunny place to hike in the winter. The following year, we returned 7 times, trying to go back every 3 weeks or so to track the changing waves of wildflowers. We found unusual plants almost every time. Each time we returned, we thought we’d seen it all, only to be surprised by another exciting find. I’d been there 17 times altogether, but somehow I’d missed seeing most of the July blooming. So yesterday (July 12), we headed back there again. I was quite certain that, this time, we wouldn’t find anything special.

Pretty red gland-tipped hairs cover much of the inflorescence of this pretty rose growing a mere 5″ off the ground.

Imagine my surprise when the second I stepped out of the car, there were some roses blooming—practically flat on the ground. I only know of one rose that grows like this, Rosa spithamea, the well-named ground rose. I’d only seen it in the southern part of the Rogue-Umpqua Divide (at Abbott Butte and nearby), so I wasn’t ready to jump to that ID right away. There were some taller Rosa gymnocarpa growing nearby, so we had to consider these might just be odd plants of that. Perhaps they’d been mowed down by trail work or something. Nope. The undeveloped hips were completely different. Those of R. gymnocarpa are glabrous and somewhat narrow. Red glands covered the hips, sepals, leaf margins and more of the low-growing roses. We found several more areas of them still close to the trail just south of the Spur Road 435 parking area that comes in about a third of the way up the trail. Despite keeping an eye out for them all day as we headed north up the trail, we never found more, but it would be worth looking along the southern end of the trail. After looking through photos and the floras, I’m pretty convinced they are indeed Rosa spithamea (but if someone has a better idea, let me know!). Read the rest of this entry »