Mountain Plants of the Western Cascades

Posts Tagged ‘Perideridia’

Gorgeous farewell-to-spring really glows when backlit.

On July 31st, I decided to make one last trip to Tire Mountain to look at the final wave of flowers and collect some seeds. I was especially hoping to get seeds of the late-blooming farewell-to-spring (Clarkia amoena) while still seeing some fresh flowers, but I was surprised that hardly any seeds were ripe, and there were many buds still in evidence—on the last day of July! I’ve gotten a few started at home, but since they are annuals, I need a large enough population to be able to keep themselves going. Most other plants were in seed, and I was able to collect a number of species, including several biscuitroot (Lomatium dissectum, L. utriculatum, and L. nudicaule), my favorite bluefield gilia (Gilia capitata), rosy plectritis (Plectritis congesta), and Oregon fawn lily (Erythronium oregonum). Read the rest of this entry »

From the hidden lower meadow, there’s a distant view of the mountains beyond Oakridge, including Diamond Peak on the right and Fuji Mountain in the center, both still snowy. You can also make out the two west-facing meadows of Heckletooth Mountain near Oakridge, to the left and below Diamond Peak.

Last month I went to Tire Mountain to check out a hidden meadow below the trail near the beginning of the Tire Mountain trail (see Off the Beaten Path at Tire Mountain). I wasn’t paying attention, however, and went up the wrong meadow. Having first explored it in the fall of 2012, I still needed to get back and check it out while it was still in bloom. I had also wanted to return to see the yampah (Perideridia sp.) in bloom and hopefully collect some seeds of early blooming flowers. My schedule has been pretty full, so I figured I’d better jump on the first decent day before it was too late. So on Sunday, June 19, I headed up to Tire Mountain hoping to accomplish at least some of my goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Harsh paintbrush in bloom, looking south across the large east-facing meadow near the beginning of the trail.

This yampah has highly divided and irregular lower leaves as described for Periderida bolanderi, but the upper leaf has only a few lobes, and looks much more like one would expect for P. oregana.

Tire Mountain is one of my favorite spots and one of the premier wildflower destinations in Lane County and in the Western Cascades. Yet I have very few reports on my blog. That is because I had already been to Tire Mountain so many times before I started my blog that I haven’t been very often in the last few years, and it had been 5 years since I’d been during flowering season—far too long! I never had gotten back to check out the lower meadows that I explored in fall of 2012 (see Forensic Botany at Tire Mountain), and I also needed to go back to look at the suspicious yampah that might be Perideridia bolanderi. I was on my own for the day, so it seemed a good opportunity to do some more exploring, and there’s so much to see at Tire Mountain, both on and off the trail. Read the rest of this entry »

In late August last year, I discovered a new rocky meadow just southwest of Patterson Mountain (see Exploring near Patterson Mountain). I wrote that I expected it to be blooming in May. Well, May is here, so it was time to see what it looked like in bloom. On Monday, May 9, John Koenig and I went up Road 1714 off of Patterson Mountain Road 5840. We parked at the quarry on the bend in the road and walked down the road for about a tenth of a mile. A very short walk through the woods brought us to the top of the east end of the steep meadow in a couple of minutes.

It can be hard to come up with a good name for a place, but we didn’t want to have to refer to this area as “that rocky meadow off Road 1714”. The masses of Indian dream fern gave us the idea to name the meadow after it.

Naked broomrape growing out of spring gold. Without digging the plants up to look for the attached haustorium, it is only a guess that they are parasitizing the spring gold.

I was thrilled to see so many brightly colored flowers after last year’s trip when most everything was dried out and brown. There were lots of purple larkspur (Delphinium menziesii) in full bloom as well as two slightly different shades of yellow lomatiums—both spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum) and the deeper yellow Hall’s lomatium (L. hallii) were abundant. Bright red paintbrushes were coming into bloom. They were quite variable. Some plants had the lobed leaves and wide, fluffy flower heads of harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida), while others had the unlobed leaves and narrow flower heads characteristic of frosted paintbrush (C. pruinosa). With the handlens I was able to find a few forked hairs on some of the plants, indicating at least some frosted paintbrush in their lineage. I’ve seen these mixed populations in many places in the area, so I wasn’t surprised. I assume the two species are hybridizing, but it would take DNA work to confirm my lay theory.

We poked around the east end of the meadow and finally discovered a small patch of Thompson’s mistmaiden, something I thought I’d seen dried plants of last year. It is so small, however, that I didn’t trust identifying it from seed, so I was pleased to find it in flower. We were very happy to find quite a few very bright purple flowers of naked broomrape (Orobanche uniflora). Their flowers were larger than usual, and from a distance we had trouble picking them out among the larkspur. I was surprised that they weren’t parasitizing the nearby wholeleaf saxifrage (Micranthes integrifolia) where I frequently find them, but rather they were growing most often among the spring gold. Rosy plectritis (Plectritis congesta) was everywhere but just budding up, so there will be plenty of color later in the month. Read the rest of this entry »

Red, white, and blue wildflowers prepare for Fourth of July

Bristow Prairie is a large, damp meadow area in the Calapooya Mountains. There is a trail of sorts that starts in Douglas County and runs along a ridge down to the main meadow area. A wet meadow and a shallow lake with a number of aquatic plants lie below the trail just by the county line. The trail is harder to follow to the north on the Lane County side—or so I thought. I’d only been there twice. The first trip (see Bristow Prairie), Sabine and I checked the lake and explored the Douglas County ridge looking for Horkelia fusca. I’ve seen it in a few places in Douglas County, but it seems determined to avoid crossing into Lane County. Late last summer, we bushwhacked down to two small lakes hidden in the woods, one on each side of the county line (see Hidden Lakes at Bristow Prairie), and then did a little exploring on the ridge to the north. We came across a large, open, gravelly slope. As it was August, it was all dried up, but it definitely looked worth returning earlier in the year. We also found an odd dried up plant that I later determined must be whisker brush (Leptosiphon [Linanthus] ciliatus), something I’d never even heard of, let alone seen. Read the rest of this entry »