Posts Tagged ‘Olallie Mountain’
Olallie Mountain Trip
Unusual two-flowered steer's head (Dicentra uniflora)
I went to Olallie Mountain yesterday. Perfect time for all the snow-melt stuff I was looking for (still some small patches of old snow as well as some of the new fallen stuff from the other day). Lots of fresh glacier lilies, lovely swaths of Mertensia bella with many more in bud, fading Caltha leptosepala in the meadow creek, great clumps of trilliums some with their flowers browsed on, blooming Orogenia fusiformis and my first look at a Dicentra uniflora still in bud. Also saw a Dicentra “biflora” with 2 flowers! That was a first. The Ribes erythrocarpum was in bloom weaving through the clumps of beargrass and over fallen logs.
One of the most interesting things of the day was after I relocated the Polystichum andersonii. The new fronds are still unfurling and the old ones are tattered and flattened on the ground. Having discovered they have vegetative buds like some of the garden Polystichums I have (a friend gave me some off of her plant and they are growing well), I looked at the old leaves and discovered almost all of them did have one bud. Some were already rooting and pinning the old leaf to the ground. While I still only found the 2 large plants from last year, there will be more there in the future! I never understood what good it did having all those plantlets up on the frond if they don’t fall off. But now I see that the problem in my garden is there is no snow to press the frond onto the ground. It’s actually (not surprisingly) a very efficient system.