Posts Tagged ‘Maianthemum’
Planning Trip to Grassy Glade
I do hope that some of the beautiful purple milkweed will be in bloom on our upcoming trip to Grassy Glade!
Beautiful harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida) blooms along the road by Hills Creek Reservoir.
On Saturday, May 27, I headed out to the Rigdon area to plan the field trip I’m leading for the Native Plant Society of Oregon Annual Meeting the following Saturday. I want to give people a taste of the interesting plants in this area that are more common to the south, especially the lovely purple (or heartleaf) milkweed (Asclepias cordifolia) that I’ve written about so many times. I’ve been crossing my fingers that we will see some in bloom somewhere, but with the crazy shift in weather this spring, it’s hard to anticipate how the plants are going to react. There are lots of great places in the Rigdon area, but I wanted to know which would work best for our non-trail field trip.
I drove straight to Grassy Glade and parked along the side road near the beginning of the meadow. I did a quick spin through the meadow, which was half baked and half moist. On the road in, I had noticed some of the potholes were partly filled with water. Obviously, some of the thunderstorms that I’d heard had occurred out here had blessed the area with some much-needed moisture—there hasn’t been a drop for almost three weeks at my house. My guess is that some of the meadow had already dried out before the rain, while the moister parts had been refreshed before the annuals died. Spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum) and many species of clover (Trifolium spp.) had started along with the cute narrow-leaf owl’s clover (Castilleja attenuata). Read the rest of this entry »
More Exploring on Road 5884
From part way up on the slope, there’s a good view to the north of Mt. David Douglas on the left and the gentle south side of Fuji Mountain on the right.
A small bee visiting the equally small flowers of swamp currant (Ribes lacustre).
Last year, John Koenig, Sabine Dutoit, and I spent a great day at Lopez Lake and other interesting spots near the end of Road 5884 (see Glorious Day Near Lopez Lake), east of southeast of Oakridge. I went a short ways up the talus slope at the terminus of the road, but that only whetted my appetite to get close enough to the cliffs at the top and left sides of the slope to see what grew on them. So that was my main goal last Sunday, June 7.
It was a very warm day, so I headed to the cliff first. Rather than plowing through the large alder thicket and walking up the large boulders in the middle like I did last year, I decided to follow a small creek at the left edge, hoping to get to the north-facing cliffs along the side. No doubt this area was an old quarry, and it left a sharp cliff below the forest on that side of the slope and some flatter areas on the way up. This turned out to be a very good way to get started, as I avoided the majority of the alders. I also saw some beautiful, perfectly blooming stink currant (Ribes bracteosum) and other wetland plants. There was obviously quite a bit of moisture coming down from above, and one of the interesting things about the area was how many plants there were on this rocky slope that one would expect to see in a wetland or a forest. Many clumps of tall bluebells (Mertensia paniculata) were in bloom almost all the way up the 300′ slope. The moisture-loving swamp gooseberry (Ribes lacustre) also grew among the rocks as well as at the edges of the wetlands I visited later in the day. On the somewhat more level section about halfway up, there was a gorgeous display of false Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) and another “woodland” plant, red baneberry (Actaea rubra). This also seemed like a strange place to see so much Fendler’s waterleaf (Hydrophyllum fendleri) and Sitka valerian (Valeriana sitchensis).