Posts Tagged ‘fire’
Early Season at Tire Mountain
Spreading phlox (Phlox diffusa) is one of the treats for those who do early botanizing in rocky areas. The yellow flowers of spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum) were just starting to appear.
My first caterpillars of the year! These two checkerspot caterpillars have overwintered as small caterpillars, so they may have woken up recently. Between the spines and the distasteful iridoid glycosides in the harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida), they are well protected from predators and can relax in the open.
Both Molly Juillerat and I are leading trips to Tire Mountain during the Native Plant Society of Oregon‘s annual meeting next week, so on May 20, we headed up there together to see if the road and trail were open and how the plants were looking. The cold, wet April slowed spring down, but the hot and dry May weather that followed created an odd combination of the flowers barely having started, while the moss was already dried out. The typically great show of annuals, including seep monkeyflower (Erythranthe microphylla), large-flowered blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia grandiflora), rosy plectritis (Plectritis congesta), and bluefield gilia (Gilia capitata) will probably be disappointing, but hopefully the deep roots of many of the perennials like deltoid balsamroot (Balsamorhiza deltoidea) and the four different species of lomatium (L. hallii, utriculatum, nudicaule, and dissectum) will still be tapping April moisture for a while. And, of course, we are still praying for rain in June before the actual summer drought starts! Read the rest of this entry »
Spring Comes Exceptionally Early to Grizzly Peak
A few spring whitlow grass (Draba verna) are hardly noticeable, but en masse they are quite pretty.
Last Tuesday (April 15), I went down to southern Oregon for a quick but rewarding trip. Almost every year, I’ve gone down in mid-April to shop at a fantastic rock garden plant sale put on by one of the NARGS members in the area. Sadly, this is going to be her last sale, so I didn’t want to miss the chance to buy some more gems for my rock garden (many to replace those that didn’t make it through the tough winter). I was also in luck that a quilting store in Ashland was just starting their going-out-of-business sale, so I was able to stock up on batik fabric for my new-found creative passion, quilting. I always get in as much botanizing as I can squeeze into two days while I’m in the area, but I never expected I would have the opportunity to get up to Grizzly Peak so early in the year. With the trailhead at 5200′ and the peak—such as it is—at 5900′, it is usually covered with snow in April, but from what I hear, there has been almost snow in the area, and they’ve missed much of the rain we’ve had farther north in February and March.