A year of flowers #63: Oregon checkermallow

 

Sidalcea oregana

We are in the midst of a weirdly-epic heat wave here in the Northwest.  Today is supposed to get up to 107º, which is not the sort of temperature we are used to seeing around here in late June.  Honestly, 107º is unusual for August.  I notice that some flowers are thrilled by the heat (the Scarlet gilia is exploding out there), but others, like this Oregon checkermallow, are wilting a bit.  This plant has been very successful here, though.  I bought a couple of small plants in 2014, as well as some seed, and they've seemed very happy here.  But today?--not so much.

A year of flowers #62: Grand collomia

   

Collomia grandiflora

This is an annual flower, native to most of the Pacific Northwest. Jim Roberts first alerted me to it, since a few scrawny ones try to scrape out an existence in the rocky conditions out by North River Road, coming out to our corner of Palouse.  The combination of the peaches-and-cream orange with the little pale blue anthers inside the flower is striking.  All of my Collomia came from seed from Thorn Creek Native Seeds, but now I get enough to spread from my own supply.  I have recommended Thorn Creek as a source elsewhere, but in a project like this, it has been great to be able to buy some seeds from a trusted source that you know is indeed, all local.  All of Jacie Jensen's (the owner of Thorn Creek) seeds are from native plants that grew on her family farm on the aptly-named Paradise Ridge just south of Moscow, ID.  Without people like Jacie, Jim, and Charlotte, I can't imagine having been able to do this work. 

A year of flowers #60 & #61: Paintbrush

 

Castilleja miniata

 

Castilleja cusickii
 

For years I've wanted to grow Paintbrush. There are several species that grow around here, and they are a peculiar plant, because they are parasites--they need a host plant.  For years I tried to get them to grow with Idaho fescue, but it never worked.  I tried seed, I tried little plants from various sources.  Nothing.  I'd watch a plant slowly fade, and it was sad.  I heard that people got good results growing them with Taperleaf penstemon, but not me. 

Until now. 

Charlotte, whose praises I sang in the previous post, knew that I've wanted Paintbrush for years, and when there was no Idaho Native Plant Society plant sale last year, she brought me a few plants that would have been in the sale--three Castilleja and some small Taperleaf penstemon for host plants.  It was July, and really it seemed pretty futile to try to plant sensitive native species in July, but I kept watering them.  I was stunned to see this year that I've got two vigorous C. miniata clumps going, and one C. cusickii... doing great. I truly have no idea whatsoever why I was successful this time, but I think it was Charlotte spreading her awesome native plant juju.  

A year of flowers #59: Showy milkweed

 

Asclepias speciosa

This is the ideal food for Monarch butterflies, I am told, though I haven't seen them here.  For me, this plant begins my paean of gratitude to Charlotte, who if there were such a person, would be Charlotte Milkweed-Seed.  If you need milkweed around Palouse, she can fix you up.  

Anyone in Palouse reading this will know what I mean, when I say that our town of about a thousand has a weirdly high proportion of wonderful generous, creative, and brilliant people.  I already mentioned my first native plant sensei, Jim, who helped me realize that we were surrounded by magnificent plant life here, in the dwindling era of what was the Great Palouse prairie.  I've given a shout-out to Jacie Jensen of Thorn Creek Native Seeds, who sells authentic local native plant seed.  But there are many here, and one is Charlotte, who has given me some spectacular plants, including this massive Showy milkweed that was the first milkweed I planted.  As you can see, it has decided that it belongs here.  This is truly the Mother of All Milkweeds.  Between Charlotte, the Idaho Native Plant Society (White Pine Chapter) plant sale, and Jacie Jensen's seeds, I have a couple of dozen growing here now.  

 

We are now at what I understand is "peak prairie," when the tallest plants push up as high as they will go, blooming their best out there, the grass going to seed. 

 

 

A year of flowers #58: Western hawkweed

  

Hieracium scouleri

 

I now have several clumps of Western hawkweed growing out there, but I killed my first one.  It was early in my interest in native plants, and I bought a Western hawkweed plant from someone selling native plants at the Moscow (ID) Farmers' Market.  It settled in right away and was doing great, when I read something about hawkweed being a terrible noxious weed, not to be grown under any circumstances.  I immediately dug it up and into the compost it went.  Oops, the terrible invasive weed wasn't my Western hawkweed, it was H. aurantiacum, the dreaded Orange hawkweed.  ...sigh... oh well...

A year of flowers #57: Agoseris

 

Agoseris grandiflora

 

Year ago, when I encountered these in the prairie, they so resembled dandelions that I dug up a couple of them.  But there were enough plants out there that I didn't plant that were real natives, that it finally dawned on me that I had better ID everything.  And so I figured out that this was some sort of Agoseris.  I am pretty sure (though not 100%) that this is A. grandiflora.  

 

A year of flowers #56: Scarlet gilia

 

Ipomopsis aggregata

 

Now it's summer, and there is no more spectacular native plant to announce the solstice than Scarlet gilia.  Summer flowers don't mess around, and while there are stunning blooms on the horizon as we come to "peak prairie," Scarlet gilia is a remarkable plant.  It is biennial (or "short-lived") and in their first year they put out a ferny-looking rosette on the ground.  Then you get these amazing red spikes (no color tweaking is done in these images), so last year I knew already that it would be good this year.  I had seen a few around Kamiak Butte, so I knew this was a native when I spotted a substantial drift of it in the road cut on Route 27 going north from Palouse to Garfield, years ago.  All my seed came from one afternoon where I collected some there, along with the Phacelia seed that produced those still-blooming bee-smothered white spikes in the background.  By starting several patches of these with a few handfuls of seed, they now are a population that I've been able to spread throughout the project. The pink is Clarkia, still going strong. 

Scarlet gilia has a strange scent, and the bees, other insects, and hummingbirds are mad for it.  I assume there must have been traditional Native American medicinal uses for it.  It just seems like a powerful plant, somehow.  As we go into July, the hummingbirds will begin a peculiar aerial ballet, alighting on it, then zipping around the flowers and suddenly shooting hundreds of feet straight up in the air.  I am happy to provide the bird-nip for the show.  Significantly, the deer, bunnies, etc. do not mess with this stuff. 

A year of flowers #55: Blanket flower

  

Gaillardia aristata

 

I love seeing a native bee doing its thing there in this photo.  I have other clumps of Gaillardia going, all from seed from Thorn Creek Native Seeds--so, a local source--but this one is different.  This came from seed from about a half mile east of me, at a bend in the North fork of Palouse River. This flower is so beautiful, I had collected seeds for it years ago, and I had 4-5 clumps of it going strong in various spots out there, when I got the Palouse Conservation District grant in 2013, and received the advice that I needed to scatter seed from a plant like this on bare ground, raked in to the top 1/4".  This plant does not seem to sprout from seed planted in this way, however, and while I was learning this through experience, the voles (oh yes, the dreaded voles) discovered that Gaillardia root was tasty, and I started discovering holes where plants had recently been.  It seemed that ALL of these really-local Gaillardia were gone by 2018, and while I had others... this seemed like a sad thing to lose.  Then, last year... a few tell-tale leaves came up where one of these old ones had been, and it gave up a few flowers.  This year, there are many blooms there, and I will be now be able to bring this local one back here.  Whew, that was close!

A year of flowers #54: Needle-leaved navarretia

 

Navarretia intertexta

 

This is another native plant that was here already when I moved in, in a few dry exposed spots (and I've noticed it beside the gravel road east of me, growing in pretty harsh conditions), and while lovely little white sparkles hover an inch off the ground now, they do turn into little stickery things.  I used to pull it like the Fiddleneck, but one June day many years ago, I thought--I had better see if this is a native before I pull it all out.  And it was.  So I watch it, but I basically let it go...

A year of flowers #53: Tapertip onion

 

Allium acuminatum

 

All of my Allium has come from the side of the gravel road about a mile or so east of me, just across the border in Idaho, where I collected this seed for several years.  Now they spread themselves around.  

A year of flowers #52: Syringa

  

 

Philadelphus lewisii

 

I was surprised to learn years ago that "Syringa," one of the common names for this shrub, was not in its scientific name, but it's poetic nonetheless.  It is the state flower of Idaho, and was collected by Meriweather Lewis as part of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition.  This is also known as "Lewis's mock-orange" and it has a sublime scent in those lovely flowers.

 

A year of flowers #51: Blue elderberry

 

Sambucus nigra

I have planted four Blue elderberry shrubs in the prairie, but the birds have planted three, including this 20-foot-tall monster example that was the first one I had out there.  It came out of nowhere, and Jim Roberts (my neighbor and native plant sensei) properly identified it for me. 

They have an interesting growth habit that you can see in this photo, that they are always putting on new growth, and the old growth sort of dies off and sits there.  Of course the berries had all sorts of uses, but these dead elderberry stalks were also important to Native Americans.  When I first came here in 1990 and started teaching in the WSU music department, there was a professor there, Loran Olsen, who had been a pianist in his earlier career, but over the years had first befriended, then was accepted by the local Nez Perce as someone who respected and tried to support and encourage traditional arts.  He was teaching a course in Native American music and, because I had no education whatsoever in this heritage, I audited his course so I could learn more.  After Dr. Olsen retired, the course was taken over by Dr. Ron Pond, a Umatilla/Palootspu shaman with whom I shared an office off-and-on for many years.  He was the real deal, and I felt fortunate to have learned a great deal from him as well.

Among the Nez Perce, flutes are made from hollowed-out Blue elderberry stalks.  They have a hard outside and a soft inside that you can push out with a harder stick or other tool and make a tube.  You make a fipple with pine tar (or chewing gum--Dr. Olsen's idea for making them with his Native American music class), and then you adjust the hole above the fipple, to make a sound by wrapping it with sinew.  

When a plant gets some age on it, there are often these dead stalks that have been hollowed out by wind and weather sticking out from the plant, and they can whistle in the wind.  The Nez Perce believe that the Great Spirit brought them music and taught them how to make flutes, by making the elderberry stalks sing in the wind.

A year of flowers #50: Phacelia

   

Phacelia heterophylla 

 

I collected the seeds for this because I was at a spot collecting seeds for another plant, saw the dried up stalks of this, and thought, "That looks like a native.  I'll just collect the seeds and find out."  Sometimes that can be an unwise strategy, but in this case it worked out.  Especially since, as with several of the flowers I have been posting, the original site was purged of native plants by some fool drunk on herbicide. 

Lots of it sprouted, enough that I was a little worried that it was some invasive noxious thing, but it is indeed native, and apparently much appreciated by the local native bees.  The clumps of it are buzzing with them.  For some odd reason, many people have been promoting dandelions as this great thing to grow for bees.  I mean, grow whatever you want, but dandelions are an invasive noxious weed, and I pull every one I find.  They are not, however, the first food for bees (I recall that I had posted the first 15-16 flowers in this series before dandelions started blooming around here), and they are not nearly as good a source for pollen as many of these natives are.  I am not a very skilled photographer, and it was tricky to get a shot of one of these bees doing their thing, but you can see the little bee working their magic in the middle of the photo, below.

 

A year of flowers #49: Ponderosa pine

  

Pinus ponderosa

I am not entirely sure what stage of this bloom this image captures.  First it's a hard purple-wine-colored bud, and then it's like this as it heads toward being a cone, so I'm calling this the flower.  

Planting Ponderosa pine seedlings in the prairie thirty years ago this month is what started it all.  It was a weedy alfalfa field, but a friend of mine knew about free little tree seedlings left over from the University of Idaho plant sale, and I got a bunch that I planted randomly all over the property.  About a third of them got mowed, but now there are a bunch of c.30-foot pine trees out there, looking like real trees.  They form an important habitat for a lot of native plants, which sprout under their dappled shade.  I used the photo below to try to capture the white yarrow clouds (which it doesn't really quite do), but I will use it again here to show some of these pines.  

A year of flowers #48: Rocky Mountain little sunflower

  

Helianthella uniflora

I just visited a tiny-but-rich remnant of Palouse prairie, and it was wall-to-wall with these flowers.  I now have a bunch of clumps of these coming up, but for years I struggled with these and certain other native flowers--that, for the life of me, I could not get them to sprout.  As with many parts of this project, I have had to learn by doing, and when you get something wrong in a long-term project like this, it can be several years turning that ship around!  The conventional wisdom on growing native flowers is that you clear some dirt and gently rake the seeds into the top 1/4" or so.  There are certainly plants for which that method works, but definitely not for this one, or Gaillardia, or Sticky geranium, or Balsamroot, etc.  So, when I got my grant from the Palouse Conservation District, I had my first contact with some plant experts who told me about the 1/4" raking thing, I took their advice, and as a result... I wasted a lot of seed.  In addition, plants that were not very long-lived (like Gaillardia) started fading away because new plants weren't being established.  In fact, because voles like to eat the roots, I had lost ALL but one of the original Gaillardia whose seed I had collected down the road (future post on those--they are just coming on now).   

Now, to the credit of these experts, they understood that recreating Palouse prairie was a new thing--apparently I am among the first people who have tried it.  After the failure of the rake method, I returned to my "divot" method--dig a few shovelfuls of dirt, turn it over, and break it up, and work the seed into the top inch or so.  And since then I have gotten all the species that failed in the years I was raking in seed.  I informed the expert who had advised me otherwise, and he said he appreciated my sharing my experience because they really don't know how best to do this.  I did a couple of posts on my rake-versus-divot experiments a few years ago... 

 

https://palouserivermusic.blogspot.com/2015/11/rake-versus-divot.html

https://palouserivermusic.blogspot.com/2016/05/rake-vs-divot-part-two.html

A year of flowers #47: Yarrow

 

Achillea millefolium

 

Yarrow is another flower like Wyeth's buckwheat that creates hovering clouds over the green in June.  Yarrow is white, while the buckwheat is cream/pale yellow. I have never planted yarrow--it was here when I arrived, and through all the mistakes and disasters, yarrow persists.  I can't seem to get a photo that delivers the effect of the floating white yarrow clouds, but it is lovely out there.

A year of flowers #46: Wyeth's buckwheat

Paddy, the border collie, with drifts of Wyeth's buckwheat

 

 

Eriogonum heracleoides

In June, we begin to get several different species blooming that look like little clouds hovering over the green.  All of my Wyeth's buckwheat seed came from down the road, just across the border in Idaho, years ago.  I wondered if it's edible, since it produces a LOT of seed, which has enabled me to spread it all over the property, as well as share with locals who want to grow it.  I did a little research and have found that other Eriogonum spp. were used by Native Americans for food, so I can't imagine this one didn't get used that way, but I don't know for sure... 

A year of flowers #45: Velvet lupine

 

Lupinus leucophyllus

 

I am not sure why the other lupine I have is known as a "silky" lupine, while this one is "velvet," but this is the first lupine with which I had success.  It is arguably not as beautiful a bloom as L. sericeus, but it's interesting how the colored part of the bloom ascends the flower stalk.  I have noticed that this variety grows in a few spots around my little town of Palouse, and I collected the seeds for mine many years ago from an area near a trailer park right at the junction of route 272 and route 95, just across the border in Idaho.  That patch has long ago been mowed/sprayed to death, so I feel fortunate for having rescued these.  At first I was disappointed that I hadn't collected the seeds of the "pretty lupine," but this one has grown on me (pun intended).  For one thing, I must have gotten very lucky to get those seeds, which I have struggled to collect from my own plants (they seem to be immature in the pod, but they immediately disappear on ripening), yet they manage to shed viable seeds and spread all by themselves.  And they are very happy here, apparently.

A year of flowers #44: Silky lupine

   

Iris sericeus

Silky lupines are the most common native lupine in the Palouse region, and they put on a beautiful bloom.  At first, I had a lot of trouble getting them to grow, though.  They'll die if you try to transplant them, and until I discovered the proper method, I only managed to get a couple of plants to grow out a LOT of seed I had collected.  The trick is that the evening before you intend to plant them (so this is in fall), you heat water up to 180º, throw your seeds in, and let the water cool overnight.  The vast majority of viable seeds will germinate.  This particular lupine came from seed I purchased from Thorn Creek Native Seeds. 

A year of flowers #43: Mystery iris

 

Iris ????

Last year in late June, my neighbors Janet and Butch invited me out to the family farm, just south of Kamiak Butte, to look at some native plants before they cut the hay in that spot.  It sounded like Janet had seen some Iris out there, and they said if there was anything I would like to try to transplant that I was welcome to it, since cutting it as part of the hay every year is pretty hard on flowers like this.  The other plant they had was lupine, and in my experience it is pointless to try to move them, but iris can be moved.  The bloom was gone, but these had the slimmer leaves and color of I. missouriensis, so I dug a couple of clumps and planted them where there was no other iris--that way I'd know if that particular project was successful. 

When my other Iris missouriensis was blooming (see #30, May 18), I noticed that these had put up a bunch of leaves, but no bloom.  This is not uncommon when you move a plant, that it takes a year or so to get comfy and then it goes back to its former self.  Still, I was happy that they had lived.  Then a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that they were putting up blooms.  In the last week they bloomed and they're white.  Iris missouriensis is not white--they can be pale blue or purple, but not like this.  The other major hint that it isn't the same species is of course that it bloomed weeks later.  I made a bouquet of native flowers from the prairie for Janet as a thank you, and she took this photo of the flower.

There are not many white native iris species, it turns out.  The closest I could find is I. chrysophylla, which is native to Northern CA, and Western OR.  The veins in the petals are more pronounced, it seems, but it's similar.  There are other examples of species turning up in the Western part of the state, and having an echo population in the Palouse, which is the highest ground east of the Cascades (our elevation here is about 2600 feet). One possibility is that these irises are such a group.  https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/iris/Pacific_Coast/iris_chrysophylla.shtml

 

I know the official Whitman County botanist, and sent her an email today.  Maybe we have a new species.  I will go out to the spot where I got these in the next few days, and hopefully I will see others.  I will report back.

UPDATE 6/16/21

I heard back from Dr. Brunsfeld.  She said that it is indeed a Rocky Mountain iris, but that it is an unusual white blooming example.  I did return to the site where I had found it, and I realized that I was lucky to get this.  They must not have hayed the spot last year which is why I saw this then, but this year it was hayed as usual, and nothing but grass was visible.  

A year of flowers #42: Cow parsnip

 

Heracleum maximum

I think Cow parsnip is spectacular.  Nice to have a substantial shrub-sized native that will take up some real estate out there.  Its scientific name (yes, it was named for Hercules) makes me think it ought to be a character in Transformers cartoons--it sounds like "Optimus Prime"!  Anyway, one farmer I know thought it was hilarious that I was planting Cow parsnip, but I love it.  

I do have a public-service announcement related to this.  You may have heard of a really-awful non-native invasive plant called "Giant hogweed."  It is for real, and it is in fact a relative of Cow parsnip--its scientific name is Heracleum mantegazzianum.  It apparently gives people nasty burns and there is an effort to eradicate it, for good reason.  I have heard that some people are sensitive to Cow parsnip, too--apparently, it can irritate the skin--but nothing like Giant hogweed.  So, I sincerely hope people don't start going after cow parnsip, a benign native, which grows all over the Pacific Northwest.  

Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on Giant hogweed, and it includes a section comparing Giant hogweed and Cow parnsip (scroll down to "similar species").  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum

A year of flowers #41: Clarkia

 

Clarkia pulchella

 

For the first couple of years after I moved here, I saw a single Clarkia blooming in the east part of the property.  I had no idea what it was but it was memorable.  It is an annual, so clearly it seeded itself those first couple of years, but then it was gone.  Later I recognized what it was, and found a source down the road.  A little bit of seed from those, and this population was off and running.  My effort to re-establish Clarkia in the prairie has been an unqualified success.  They're everywhere. 

A year of flowers #40: Wood's rose

Rosa woodsii

There's a copse of Wood's rose and snowberry in the Northeast corner of the property that was here when I moved here, although I think I was the first person to encourage it.  This rose is from that patch.  This native rose sprouts all over the property, though, and I have moved many sprouts to spots here and there in the prairie.  Like the Ponderosa pine, Wood's rose provides protection for many other more delicate plants, and the birds love building their nests in that copse.

A year of flowers #39: Roundleaf alumroot

 

Heuchera cylindrica

This was a native plant that my wife Dona recognized right away, calling them "coral bells" when we saw them on our first hike up Kamiak Butte.  Both of the plants we have are exactly in the same sort of habitat, northeast of a Ponderosa pine, in the (mostly) shade of the tree.  When I had my prairie restoration grant six years ago, I bought these two from a local source, and they were definitely the same as those I saw in nearby prairie sites, but I purchased another three from a nursery in the area that claimed that they were selling "native plants," and they were definitely some other heuchera--they went into the regular garden.  I guess every plant is native somewhere, but in this case, I really am trying to get the local varieties going...

A year of flowers #38: Cinquefoil

  

Potentilla gracilis

The common name for this is actually "Five-fingered cinquefoil," which strikes me as odd because that means "Five-fingered five finger."  All of my cinquefoil began with collecting seeds from from two spots nearby where there was a ton of it growing, the corner of a pasture in my neighborhood and a spot of railroad land in between Palouse and Garfield. 

A year of flowers #37: Lewis flax

 

 

Linum lewisii

I could tell that these were blooming, but I was going out to photograph after dinner, when the light was getting rich and the shadows were getting long, and these were all closed up.  So, this morning I was out there at 7am, and got my shot. 

A year of flowers #36: Prairie smoke

 

Geum triflorum

This weird flower looks like it might be from another planet.  It's other common name is "Old man's whiskers," I guess for the wild grayish hairs that fly off in all directions.