A year of flowers #35: Taperleaf penstemon

 

 

Penstemon attenuatus

I confess that I hadn't ever seen this plant in the wild, up on Kamiak Butte or wherever, until I ordered seed from Thorn Creek Native Seeds, planted it, and discovered that this plant loves it here.  I realize that the reason I had never seen it was that in late May, I never had time to go hiking.  This is prime time for the vegetable garden going in, and the never-ending weed patrol around here.  

I have been trying for years to get any of the various Indian paintbrush (Castilleja) species to grow here.  They have to feed on a host plant, and I had gotten nowhere with trying to get it to grow on Idaho fescue.  Another plant that experts said would work is Penstemon, and I tried that for years, too.  Weirdly, because of the COVID pandemic,  the local White Pine chapter of the Idaho Native Plant Society native plant sale (usually in the beginning of May) didn't happen last year, and there were a lot of plants around.  My friend Charlotte came by on a regular basis with a few plants to try, and in July she had a couple of Indian paintbrush plants and baby Penstemons.  It seemed almost pointless to try to plant in July, but what the heck.  They lived, and vigorous Paintbrushes (C. miniata and C. cusickii !!) are coming up with them.  And then another paintbrush I planted a couple of years ago decided to come up in another spot with a Penstemon this year.  It must be the year! 

A year of flowers #34: Montana golden pea

 

Thermopsis montana

This one is like the previous Mule's ears post, in that... I don't have a plant that's mature enough to flower, so I went down the road and took this photo.  This is another seed that needs the 180º scarification treatment (heat up H2O to 180º, take off the heat, thrown in the seeds and let cool down overnight--plant the next day), but I hadn't tried that until a couple of years ago, so I have one plant that might flower next year, and a bunch of little, tiny three-leave sprouts.  But that's the right method for this lupine relative. Here is my biggest plant--

A year of flowers #33: Mule's ears

 

Wyethia amplexicaulis

You may have noticed that yellow composite flowers are a theme in Palouse native flora.  There are indeed lots of them.  There is a population of this particular one about a mile east of me along North River Road, and before I got serious and learned what they actually are, I called them "Shiny greenleaf balsamroot" because they seemed similar to the more common Arrowleaf balsamroot.  I was still in this stage of blissful ignorance when I collected a bag of seeds from this very clump, along with two others, one August.  It must have been in the late 90s, so over 20 years ago, that I went around my little Ponderosa pine trees and dug 8-10 clumps of dirt out in what was a pretty weedy field at that point, and planted a handful of seeds in each one.  

I had forgotten all about that when, about five years ago, I was walking out there in that spot among the trees, now filled with native grasses, and there's this big old half-deer-eaten blade of one of these leaves--they are pretty distinctive!  Each year it has put out more leaves and here it is today...

So, when you see a big clump of blooming Mule's ears out there, you can get an idea of how long it took to get that way.  My guess is that I will see my first bloom on this, my only one, in the next year or so.

A year of flowers #32: Oregon sunshine

 

Eriophyllum lanatum

This is another plant growing throughout the prairie that came from seed I purchased from Thorn Creek Native Seeds in Moscow, ID.  They appear to like it here.

A year of flowers #31: Fiddleneck

 

Amsinckia lycopsoides

I don't really deserve this one.  I mean, for many years I would pull these, because they're stickery, and invasive, but now I am capturing some seed to spread them around.  They make a nice scroll as they bloom, and I assume that's the "fiddleneck" part--they look like a violin scroll.  Since my nice violin has a fabulous scroll, I will post it here for comparison.

Once there's competition, these natives that are a little bit aggressive can be managed.  There are several plants like this, and I confess that finding out that this one is native was a bit of a surprise--like the Claytonia parviflora, earlier.  Whoa, OK, so that's native... interesting.  

A year of flowers #30: Rocky Mountain iris

 

 

Iris missouriensis

 

This image appears to have some sort of fancy lighting on the flower, but in fact this is just what it looks like (this is an unaltered iPhone photo).  One of the first times I bought native grass seed around here in the mid-90s, they also had Rocky Mountain iris seed and I bought some and put it in a wetter spot out there.  Now, 25 years later, I've got some nice patches going--enough that the deer can chomp a few and I don't worry about it.  Last year, my neighbors Butch and Janet led me to a spot on their family farm and we dug up several clumps which I have planted, but my experience is that many plants only send up leaves the first year after they get moved, so I will have to wait until next year on those. 

A year of flowers #29: Chokecherry

 

 

Prunus virginiana

 

I have a several Chokecherries on the property, but only this one is mature enough to cover itself with these cascading flower clusters.  It was planted by the birds beside my driveway. 

A year of flowers #28: Sticky geranium

 

Geranium viscosissimum

 

My oldest geraniums came from a spot about a mile east of me, but the seeds were collected years ago by a neighbor's daughter, now all grown up, and my seeds came from their house.  The seed for this geranium, however, came from a local business, Thorn Creek Native Seeds.  Jacie Jensen has collected seed from surviving Palouse prairie on her family's farm on Paradise Ridge, just south of Moscow, ID.  IMO, she is the best local source for seed.  This was a difficult plant for me to grow until I learned about soaking the seeds in hot water (you heat H2O to 180º, throw the seeds in, and let the water cool down overnight, plant the next day).  And you must be patient--it seems to average about 8 years from seed to bloom.  Several of my geraniums are blooming for the first time this year, including this beauty.  I shot the photo yesterday, but the deer chomped all the flowers on this one last night.  That's OK, the plants are built for this abuse, but... the deer are annoying.

A year of flowers #27: Western groundsel

 

Senecio integerrimus

 

The seeds for all my Western groundsel have come from down the road from me.  They seem to have recognized familiar territory and have settled in, spreading among my Ponderosa pines as they did where I collected the seed, with an understory of immature plants and a few bloomers coming up.  Since we haven't had much rain at all in the last month or so, those immature plants are looking a bit wiped out, so today I went ahead and watered them.  I planted quite a lot of native grasses last fall, a custom mix from BFI in Moses Lake (who I highly recommend if you need to buy native grasses), and they are coming up very well, so I am watering to keep them going.  The mature parts of the prairie seem to endure this drought pretty well, but I have a LOT of nice baby plants coming up that I am not willing to submit to fate.

A year of flowers #26: Bitter cherry

 

 

Prunus emarginata

It was about five years ago that the birds planted Bitter cherry in our front yard.  At that point, I knew to check it out because it was likely a native, but an "expert" told me that there was no way this was a prunus species, so I was unsure of what I had.  Then I noticed huge shrubs of it closer to town--it has a weird growth habit where branches shoot off at 90º angles, and I realized that my expert was wrong.  In her defense, knowing the range of garden plants and trees that do well here is an entirely different enterprise than knowing the natives.  I moved both of the plants out into the prairie and this one, entwined with a Chokecherry, survived, and the other did not...

A year of flowers #25: Douglas' brodiaea

   

 Triteleia grandiflora

My son just walked behind me as I pulled up this image, and asked, "Did you edit the color?"  No, I didn't.  These sit up about 30" and are pretty spectacular, but this is the only one blooming out of the hundreds of these plants I have at the south end of the property.  Several have been munched by the deer, and I decided that I had better take the photo of this one, even though all the buds had not yet popped.  It has been weirdly dry here, and I am currently watering some parts of the property that I am working on.  For the second time.  Some of the plants are showing stress, and I think these hyacinth-esque native flowers are struggling, and many are clearly deciding to stay down this year.  But this one has weirdly-intense color, maybe for the same reason.

There has always been a drift of them there, mainly pine-needle-sized leaves year after year, back along the fence.  And then one year, thick leaves will appear and it will send up a flower.  I think I tried to dig for the bulbs once, and gave up after about three feet down.  And I have collected the seeds from my flowers and unmunched seed heads from down the road.  I've tried scarifying the seed with hot water.  I have never gotten one of these to sprout.  But every year they creep in a little.

A year of flowers #24: Midget phlox

Microsteris gracilis

 

I confess to being perturbed with the botanical community, because this one is called Midget phlox, and is a sweet native annual that I have worked hard to bring back into my prairie, and now they have decided that it isn't Phlox gracilis.  No, now it's Microsteris gracilis.  Anyway, I had almost wiped this out (it blooms when several nasty plants make their presence known), but having purged major parts of the property of invasive noxious weeds, I have had the pleasure of watching this plant move back in throughout the prairie.  I seem to be unable to take the photo that would do this justice, where you walk out into an area and countless little pink and white (and every gradation between) little stars hover like a blanket three inches above the ground.  This is another plant that local plant sensei Jim Roberts pointed out to me, walking around the property years ago.

 

A year of flowers #23: Black hawthorn

Crataegus douglasii

 

Hawthorns seem to show up all over the place around here, spread by birds. This particular one started growing out in the prairie around 1993, and Jim Roberts, the neighborhood native plant sensei, said it looks like hawthorn, and he was right.  Since then several bird-planted Black hawthorns have shown up.  The thorns are nasty.  There are a couple of these growing in our front yard--the birds love the fruit and the protection--but I have learned that if you prune any branches, you must make sure you pick up every little bit.  I once stepped on a little bit in bare feet, and that was a special moment, I can tell you. 

A year of flowers #22: Fernleaf lomatium

 

Lomatium dissectum

 

Another in our tour of Lomatiums of the Palouse, this one is unique to this area (around Whitman County and just across the border in Latah County, ID).  Elsewhere its flowers are brown, which I have never seen, but here they are yellow, as with most lomatiums.  It is a nice one to plant if you have room because they fill in an area and are shrub-sized.  As you can see in the photo, I have an area of them here, and when I collected the seeds from a patch beside the road just north of Pullman, WA, they were filling in an area just like this. 

A year of flowers #21: Prairie star

 

Lithophragma parviflorum 

 

This little jewel was rescued... from my front yard.  Prairie stars are perennials, but like the other tiny annual plants in Palouse prairie, they form an understory blanket, and bits of this blanket remain in the area, sometimes in surprising places.  Out in front of our house, under an old silver maple, there was a patch of this, and for several years I would divide the patch and move a chunk of it to some spot out in the prairie.  A couple of years ago, I was able to identify a few of these as they went to seed, and the seed is the most impossibly-tiny little bits you could imagine. 

A year of flowers #20: Camas

Camassia quamash

Camas is blooming all through the prairie now, but this patch is the thickest with blooms.  It had but 4-5 blooms last year, and now it has about 30.  I think is was in 2012 when my friends Michael and Diane told me that their neighbors had a huge patch of camas, and gave us permission to collect some seed.  I used it throughout the wettest areas of my property, but chose this particular spot that had no other camas to plant a lot of only that seed, so I would know how long it took from a seed to a bloom.  So, now we know--it's about eight years. 

A year of flowers #19: Serviceberry

Amelanchier alnifolia

I am told that serviceberries make a tasty jelly, but I have yet to try it.  I'm happy to offer them up to the birds, deer, and whatever animals are passing through wanting a snack.  They're putting on a spectacular show at the moment.

A year of flowers #18: Red besseya

 Besseya rubra

This isn't perhaps the showiest native flower out there, but I think the bloom is very interesting--the reddish spikes with the little yellow florets coming off the sides.  I wrote earlier about my friend Jim Roberts introducing me to the local native Palouse flora, and this clump grew from a tiny bit he directed me to, in a drainage ditch near Kamiak Butte.  There is another clump behind this one in the background there, and my wife Dona found that one just a day or two after I planted this one.  We were walking down the gravel road east of us, and she called me over to a plant struggling out of the gravel, saying that it looked a lot like the one I had just planted.  Sure enough, she was right, and we were lucky to rescue it before a grain truck turned it into compost.

A year of flowers #17: Ballhead waterleaf

 

Hydrophyllum capitatum

 

I think these flowers are spectacular, like little fireworks on the ground. 

 

A year of flowers #16: Oregon grape

Mahonia repens

My Oregon grape is a little sad, but it is blooming now, so...  My understanding is that the jury is out among botanists as to whether the tall Oregon grape is the same species as the creeping ground-cover version we see around here.  These tall ones might be up on Kamiak Butte or around somewhere, but the creeping variety is certainly more common in my experience. One way to get native plants is to purchase them from local professionals, and I purchased two of these years ago from a reliable local source as Oregon grape, and they are indeed Mahonia repens.  But they don't creep.  In fact, they really want to shrub.

The thought is that, if they are the same species, then the conditions they are grown in determines their growth habit, and I read somewhere that, if the plant has it too easy, it grows into a bush, but stress might make it send out runners and grow as a ground cover.  As a last resort I thought, well... maybe I should stress them.  OK, so I hit this one with the Dr. Field and Brush mower last year.  It hasn't shown any signs of creeping.  Yet.  But I think I will find a runner of a creeping one in the gravel beside the road here, and leave this one alone to be whatever it is.  I have one I bought at the Idaho Native Plant Society sale several years ago that seems to have more of a creeping attitude, but is too young to bloom.  Anyway, my contribution to the botanical debate on Mahonia repens--the shrub and creeping varieties sure don't seem like the same plant here.

A year of flowers #15: Nineleaf biscuitroot

  

Lomatium triternatum

Besides L. ambiguum, which I covered a few days ago, the only other lomatium I had growing on the property when I moved here in 1991 (whoa... thirty years ago!) was this one.  There was one in the north part of what was then just a weedy alfalfa field, and one in the south, and they must have been old because they were huge examples.  At full bloom they were about three feet tall, and I have never gotten one to grow that tall since.  Alas, they died about five years or so after I moved in, and at that point I had been oblivious about collecting their seeds and keeping it going, so... that was one of the sad stories.

I knew that they had grown here though, and this is a plant that you won't have any trouble finding in this area, so I started by collecting a little seed, and discovered that it was happy to grow anywhere I planted it.  There was a spot by the side of the road, just off my usual commute into Pullman when I was teaching at WSU, where some weirdly-situated patch of ground that couldn't be farmed had a significant population of native plants, including tons of Nineleaf biscuitroot.  For several years I would wait until the seed heads were dry, and gather a good bagful, and it was a major source for the drifts now forming in the prairie.   

It continues to baffle me that unthinking destruction of the few unspoiled bits of native habitat around here still goes on.  Last year, a mile east of me, road crews on the Idaho side of the border went through and "cleaned up" the drainage ditches with a serious herbicide.  There are places where that might be an OK strategy--you know, a patch of Poison hemlock.  Absolutely, spray it.  There are problem areas, but there were stretches full of native plants, with no noxious weeds (and believe me, I know the noxious weeds around here).  They killed 'em all and let God sort it out.  I had spent years being so careful to only take a little plant here and there out of drainage ditches down the road because they were weirdly pristine above, but surely to die in the gravel beside the road, so those were the ones I transplanted.  There are more stories to come of roadside rescues.  Well, in this case, I should have taken everything because they killed all of it.  On both North and South River Roads, but thank goodness, not on the Washington side (details here for any curious Palouse residents).  And they took out fifty patches of buttercups, a bunch of glacier lilies--some beautiful slopes of native plants!--on South River Road. 

My point is that, in spite of the tiny amount of native Palouse prairie that remains, people still are finding ways to destroy it, and so it was with my source for biscuitroot seed.  I was saddened five years ago to see that whoever owned that land where I had collected that seed had hit it hard with 2,4-D, killing everything but the grass.  Another Palouse prairie remnant gone.  But that Nineleaf biscuitroot, at least, lives on in my prairie. 

A year of flowers #14: Upland larkspur

 Deliphinium nuttallianum

This is definitely one of my favorite native plants around here.  There were a few of them on the edges when I first moved here, then they would mysteriously vanish one year, coming back in a year or two.  There were a few that got going in the middle of the property, and after a few years they were gone.  I am not entirely sure how this works.  This year there are not many out there, but in this spot last year there must have been thirty of them.  I have a suspicion that they appear as little seedlings and then disappear for a year or so, building roots, then they come up and die back for several years.  So when you see a slope with hundreds of these, you are actually looking at thousands of them, but you can't see many of them.  I keep collecting seed and working them in, and at least in a few spots they've got a fairly permanent status, as here, but they make me nervous when I only see a few of them like this.

A year of flowers #13: Arrowleaf balsamroot

 Balsamorhiza sagittata

Arrowleaf balsamroot is a very common native plant in Eastern Washington, but they are not easy to grow.  My first attempt was around 1995 after half my property burned. I bought five tiny 2-3 leafed seedlings in conical plugs from someone around here selling native plants, and carefully laid the plugs in holes--disturbing the taproot is a no-no.  Three were eaten within days (it was pretty barren out there in the aftermath of the fire, and the light green leaves were not hard to spot).  Within a month, they were all gone.  I found two of the leaves in a bird nest near the house (grrr...).  Then, about nine years later, in this spot... a tiny leaf came up, and I covered that thing with chicken wire, protecting it from all evil.  It grew into this clump, and eighteen years (!!) after it had been planted, I had my first bloom.  Later, growing them from seed, I have gotten blooms in about 7-8 years, but growing Balsamroot is a commitment.  Now I have 15-20 growing around the prairie, with four substantial clumps about this size.  It has given me an appreciation for some of those massive automobile-sized patches you can see in places that have been undisturbed--they must be hundreds of years old!