A year of flowers #9: Miner's lettuce

Claytonia perfoliata

Miner's lettuce is evidently closely related to the Claytonia parviflora I posted the other day, here growing in the dappled shade of a Ponderosa pine.  I have never tried to eat the other Claytonia, though I think it's edible, but this one is tasty.  I think it tastes just like butter lettuce, which of course is how it earned its common name.

A year of flowers #8: Blue-eyed Mary

Collinsia parviflora

I love this little annual native plant.  To get a sense of scale, this is about two inches tall.  Blue-eyed Mary was spread around my property when I started, and my efforts to eliminate invasive non-native plants impacted it--the dreaded "Storksbill" (Erodium cicutarium) blooms about this same time.  But, like the Midget phlox (Phlox gracilis) that is not yet blooming there behind it (the shiny green leaves), a friend gave me these cool little mesh bags, and I have captured seeds every year, and have been returning it to its former haunts, as here. It spreads like a blanket, once it gets happy, and it makes me happy to see it doing well every place I've reintroduced it. 

A year of flowers #6 (and #7): Montia dichotoma and Claytonia parviflora

  

  Montia dichotoma

 

Claytonia parviflora

 

I thought I was going out to photograph just one little annual five-petaled flower today, the M. dichotoma, which I had identified last year.  I have been trying to identify all the tiny annual flowers that seem to play an important role in Palouse prairie, so I can stimulate their spread throughout the property.  But when I went to try to capture photographs today, I realized... wait, these are two different flowers... You can just see the leaves on the Claytonia, and I realize now that I see these plants all over the place here.  They look like little rosettes of spade-shaped leaves when they first show up.  We also have the classic Miners' lettuce--Claytonia perfoliata (not yet blooming).  I guess I will never stop learning about this prairie project...

A year of flowers #5: Desert parsley

 

Lomatium grayii

This lomatium (aka, "Desert parsley") is the next to bloom out there.  This was an early success for me.  This species grows all over the place around Palouse, and a friend of mine showed me a good spot years ago and said--show up with a grocery bag when the seeds are ripe. They easily sprouted in profusion wherever I worked them into the soil.  One of the tricks of restoring Palouse prairie, I've discovered, is to recognize plants like this that are going to be aggressive (there are several), and hold back a little on those, so that they don't dominate the landscape.  I had a wave of Western asters go through the middle of the property ten years ago that was pretty epic.  Now it has calmed down a bit, but no Palousian should go without Western aster seed...give me a call.  This year I will be at a point in this process where I am ready to work more of L. grayii into the project.

A year of flowers #4: Yellow bells

 

Yellow bell (Fritillaria pudica)

I have two of these blooming at the moment, a small flower about three inches tall.   Apparently the bulb is very tasty, and was eaten both raw and cooked by Native Americans.  The voles love them as well, and I once had bought eight of these bulbs for six dollars each, and they were lovely, but were eaten by voles.  It is covered in a post here about ten years ago (!).  And since then, I have never seen the bulbs for sale anywhere.  So, I feel lucky to have a couple hanging on, a gift from a local friend who had many acres of native plants, and I have been studying how to propagate them from seed, which I ought to be able to do, so maybe there will be more here in the future, but I doubt I will ever have enough to try to eat one.

A year of flowers #3: Grass widows

Grass widows (Olsynium douglasii), a few days ago, in my prairie.

With this post, I am finally into flowers blooming on my actual property.  My relationship with this flower goes back nearly three decades, when I used to walk down to a little fragment of fairly-unspoiled prairie about a half mile east of me.  Grass widows covered a hillside on the way down to the river.  One day in early April, a huge pile of dirt was dumped in this spot--the property owner was about to dig the foundation for a house right in the middle of native prairie.  Dozens of clumps of these were poking up through the fill dirt, and I thought... what the heck.  I assumed that there was little chance that they'd live, but they would be dead for sure within days if I left them, so I got ten clumps, and moved them to a few spots on my property that had not-really-yet become a prairie restoration project.  They all lived.  And every Spring I have taken the fattest clumps here and divided them into 2-3 smaller clumps, and planted those.  They seed and spread themselves all over as well.  Now I have hundreds.

While it is generally true that scientific names for plants are more stable than "common names," this is not the case with Grass widows.  They were Sisyrinchium douglasii for years, until the official name was changed recently based on DNA evidence, but we still call them "rinkies."  Out of hundreds of blooms, nearly all will be that lovely pink color, but rarely you will see a white bloom like this one.  Until last week, I hadn't seen this one bloom here for years. 

A year of flowers #2: Sagebrush buttercup

 

Sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus), Washington/Idaho border, east of Palouse.

This one isn't in my prairie, either.  My two clumps seem unwilling to go for a bloom this year (maybe they're slow?), and they have been overtaken by the Grass widows, which are putting on a show already.  I want to post buttercups first because, truly, the buttercup is the first Spring flower here.  Buttercups have been coming up in sunny spots on Kamiak Butte and other bits of native prairie for a few weeks now.  I went to one of my favorite sites this morning so I could find one in bloom.