botanizing

Gray's Canyon

Cottonwoods clatter.  A steady wind has risen with the evening.  The multitude of fresh leaves on plump, flexing petioles slide and shuffle against one another.  They make the noise of a crowd. 

Sometime before my arrival there was a crowd in my campsite on the Green River.  There is a large fire mound of old, gray coals and circling it is a broad ring of beer bottles.  My predecessors, as they sat around the fire, must have tossed bottle after bottle over their shoulders.  Many bottles per shoulder, I guess, and possibly several shoulders.  The many bottles shout loudly an awful egotism, although bottle litter is a squalid sign of one's power and persistent presence.   The bottle mouths had gathered sand before I arrived.  I gather the bottles into a pile, and as I gather I find more and more among the bushes.

There is a crowd in the campground down the river about a quarter of a mile. River runners were lined-up for dinner when I drove past.  Rafts were parked in the campground sites.  I have used that campground in the past but now tend to drive past.  My site up the river, despite the bottle litter, offers only the crowd of cottonwood leaves, a thicket of skunkbush, sand sage, and greasewood.  It offers this:  "kwip, kwip, kwip, kwip."  The periodic song of a lonely bird, calling from a cottonwood for a mate. 

Dance in the field

My field is in the desert, where the sun dances delightfully on sandstone.  I shall be gone for some days or weeks, and my posts are likely to be more sporadic than normal, while I collect my thoughts, stones, and blazing stars under the desert sun.

Like wind

On a triangle of sand, extending up the Selway River from the mouth of Three Links Creek, we settle one-by-one near the fire.  It is late afternoon.  Smoke rises from the one log left through the afternoon in the stone fire ring.  Ray saws a drift log into thirds.  He grabs a branch of pine and saws-off a few finger-like branches.  He puts the pine fingers along the length of the smoking log.  He adds the drift log thirds.  New smoke rises and twists.  “You’re getting smoked-out in that nice perfect spot,” Ray says to me.  I arrived first at the beach and settled into a spot with a stone backrest where I could extend my legs to the fire.  The smoke tucks back into wind from upstream, allowing me to open my eyes.  New wind gusts upstream, blowing back smoke that fills Ray’s face.  I go to the woodpile, break sticks, and pile them on the new flame.  The flame rises, the smoke goes.  The sun, too, begins to go.  The hill opposite us is half lit by sun.  Aspen leaves hold yellow light against the infiltration of darkness.  With the darkness, we share whiskey, chocolate, and words.  We share the wind. It blows upriver on the edge of a new front. “In weather reports, news of the wind always gets my attention,” Ray says. “I like wind,” he says.

Near Harvard, Idaho

Persistence of the ephemeral: Warren’s kittentail

It was Fred Hedglin who named a kittentail for Fred Warren.  Warren had been the first to recognize the population of kittentails he had found on the slope above Kamiah, Idaho, as something special.  They were natural hybrids.

Kittentails are plants of the genus Synthyris, and I’ve been studying their diversity and evolution for the past 20 years.  My work follows that of several others, including  Fred Hedglin, whose 1959 MS thesis was a taxonomic survey of what was then a fairly narrowly conceived Synthyris.   

Hedglin and his thesis advisor Arthur Kruckeberg went in search of the hybrid that Fred Warren had discovered.  Here’s how Hedglin described the scene:  “The terrain was dominated by a broad, gently side-sloped, rounded ridge running northeast to southwest.  Besseya rubra grew on the open, grassy crown of the exposed ridge, where as Synthyris missurica var. major occurred on the cool, shaded northwest-facing slope, among shrub thickets.  The few hybrid plants were found here and there in a zone between the areas of the two species . . .”

Experiments conducted by Fred Hedglin showed that the hybrids were infertile.  He had self-pollinated hybrid individuals but found that they would not produce seeds.  These were F-1 hybrids, Hedglin suggested.  They were the direct off-spring of crosses between mountain (Synthyris missurica) and red kittentails (Synthyris rubra, which Hedglin knew as Besseya rubra).  Each individual hybrid, borne from a seed, would die without making seed.  The population persisted through recurring crosses between the two species, with pollen moving from either mountain kittentail or red kittentail and the other serving as the maternal parent that would bear seeds of the hybrid. 

Without seed, the hybrid felt ephemeral.  That’s why I went back to the population last weekend—I wanted to check whether Warren’s kittentail had persisted.

I first visited the hybrid population in 1988 soon after I had started my research on kittentails, and I had not visited the population since then. One of my students had looked for the hybrids a few years ago but had failed to find them.  If either the mountain kittentail, which is restricted to the moist forest at elevations close to the Clearwater River near Kamiah, or the red kittentail of the plateau grassland were extirpated from the area, then the hybrids would be likely to become extinct.

Hedglin had noted that the area in which he found the hybrid kittentails had been logged about ten years before his visit.  The slopes above Kamiah now have second growth woods, but these parcels of woodland are edged by pastures and fields. The landscape is a mosaic, with some patches more disturbed than others.  Several houses and other buildings sit along the roads among the trees and fields. 

Little of the cool, moist forest that mountain kittentail requires persists on the hillside, although a small population of the species remains on the lower slopes near Kamiah.  The red kittentail can be found in the roadside grasses on the flat plateau above the slopes.  Most of the plateau top, an arable landscape, is now farmed.

As I drove up the road above Kamiah, I saw flowering stalks of the kittentail wagging in the roadside grasses.  These flowering stalks have the thinness and length of a kittentail’s tail, which is the source of the plant’s name.  I parked in a narrow pull-off and walked down the road to survey the roadside ditch for Warren’s kittentail.  I walked perhaps a mile.  After going first down the road about a quarter of a mile and then walking up the road beyond my truck for another quarter mile or so, I found only about a dozen of the hybrids in the grassy roadside ditch or where I could see them on the other side of a fence at the margin of woodland.  Where I walked along the roadside on a lower part of the slope, the hybrid kittentails were mixed among a few mountain kittentails.  The hybrids were always in places where they were shaded by forest, a habit of the hybrid more similar to its mountain kittentail parent than to its red kittentail parent, which tends to be in more open, sunny and drier, environments

The small population, although it has persisted through the 20 years between my visits, seems tenuous.  The lack of interfertility among the hybrid individuals seems like a boundary that narrowly circumscribes the existence of the population.   I wonder whether there might be a few seeds produced each year by the population.  The earlier artificial pollination studies that Fred Hedglin conducted could be followed-up with field studies to check for seed production by the hybrids.  As I walked along the roadside, I thought about putting bags over the flowering stalks after the pollination season was completed but before the fruits had matured.  The bagging would prevent loss of seeds when the fruits split open, and this would allow us to check for seed production in the natural population of the hybrids.  The production of seeds, assuming pollen moving from one hybrid to another, would offer a little more opportunity for persistence of Warren kittentail.

How long has Warren’s kittentail  existed on the Kamiah hillside?  I spread widely the fingers of both hands and counted across the span, tallying 10,000 years as a possibility.  About that long ago the climate of this area would have warmed after the last glaciation, the trees of the cool forests would have retreated from the plateau to the valley of the Clearwater River, and, with the opening of the plateau to sun, the red kittentail could have migrated to its current location.  Ten thousand years is an awesome span of time for an infertile hybrid.  Warren’s kittentail may have existed only for a much shorter time.  A hundred years is a possibility or even less. As I walked through the population of hybrids, I hoped for 10,000 years and for more to come.

*  *  *
Note:

Fred Hedglin’s MS thesis, A Survey of the Genus Synthyris, was submitted in 1959 to the University of Washington.

Fleet

This was Sunday, and I was several miles back a river from the remote end of a long road.  My trail followed the river.  The trail had risen from cut bank to bluff face well above the river.  Along the bluff, the trail curved in and out, passing from moist gullies, where Western red cedar shaded quickly cascading streams, out and around the face of the bluff, where the vegetation was open.  On the steep bluff face, there were scattered ponderosa pines among grasses and low perennials with bright yellow and blue and white flowers.

I had just passed a creek, where the gulley was especially shady, and there was a small waterfall. When I reached the round, outer face of the bluff, the ridgetop ahead was low and nearly flat.  There were a few ponderosa pines along the ridge.  I was only about 50 meters from that ridgetop when I caught motion. It was big, gray, and shaggy.  Its tail flipped behind as it moved.  It took a moment to register.  This was not a coyote; this was a wolf.  As I followed its movement, I saw another wolf farther ahead on the ridge. I stopped to reach for my binoculars.  As I focused the binoculars on the lead wolf, it turned back and so did the other wolf.  I had only a fleet, magnified view before they disappeared over the ridge.

Tulips

There were large red tulips on the table this week.  In the mornings, the low sun in the east comes through a spruce, breaking-up the rays, and the light glances sharply over the table.  The sun this week was in the tulips.  The sun could turn a red petal orange or simply put a lavender sheen the dark roll of a margin.  A velvety light passed through the petals. I watched against the light to see the gradation of shadows through different layers of petals.  There was a soft play of light and dark.

The Yellows and Whites

Winter lingers.  Little squalls of snow come most days.  Despite the persistence of cheek-turning cold and wintery precipitation, the hillsides show the changeover to spring.

The past two weekends, I have driven up the Clearwater River from its confluence with the Snake.  Two weeks ago, the slopes above the Clearwater had only patchy green.  The rest was the brown remains of vegetation dried last summer and matted over the winter.  Much of the green was the fern-leafed desert parsley (Lomatium dissectum).  This desert parsley forms dense populations on the steep south-facing slopes above the river.  Two weeks ago, its finely dissected leaves made airy balls—larger than a softball but smaller than a basketball—that spotted the slopes.  Sticking through center of most leaf balls was a stiff inflorescence, an umbel of small yellow flowers just above the leaves.  There weren’t enough of the flowers for the yellow to have much presence on the hills.  The hills above the Clearwater become more yellow, when the balsamroots (Balsamorhiza sagittata) bloom.  Two weeks ago, the balsamroots were no more than soft spots on the slopes.  Their fuzzy, white-haired leaves were up but still rolled rather that offering much lamina to sunlight, and there were no heads of open flowers.

Last weekend the hills above the Clearwater River had both yellows and whites.  The sunflower yellows of the balsamroots were out.  Over the week, the heads had curved up and over to face south, and they had expanded, popping-out ray flowers.  The slopes were forming islands of yellows among the greening grasses—their were the sunflower yellow islands of the balsamroots and bigger, paler yellow islands of the fern-leafed desert parsley, whose flower stalks were two feet or more in length.

The whites on the hills were serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia), Lewis’s mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii), and hawthorn (Crataegus).  On the dry hills, which have steppe vegetation, composed of grasses, herbaceous perennials, and small shrubs, the whites run up the ravines.  These ravines collect a little extra water, providing an abode for the head high shrubs of serviceberry, mock orange, and hawthorn.  These three make lines of big white dots at the bases of the hills, where the sharp slopes meet flood plain, where water also collects.

This weekend, I shall return to the Clearwater River, going beyond its middle fork, where I anticipate the scents of the white flowers.  I look forward to the sweet, fruity scent of the mock orange and to skunky late afternoon scent of the serviceberry if those afternoons become warm.  Yes, I look forward to the scents of flowers on a warm afternoon.

Creek Bubbles

A bubble slides over a lip of stone and down a flat trough in a sheet of water. Where rough stones lie across the creek, the water rumples, folding like drapery; here vortices of water must curve up from the bottom and twist around as they rise and fall back to the disheveled stones below because, here, the bubble becomes stationary, riding a round face of water.  The bubble is not still so much spinning in place.

I know the bubble spins when a string of smaller bubbles tumbles from the trough to be trapped in the vortex, where they curve round and inward, touching and cohering to the surface of the large bubble. The whole assemblage turns like a fast little planet with many moons.  The ease of this coherence, in a planetary dance, where little energy is needed to hold the whole together is simply a pleasure to watch.

Leaning over the creek edge from its sand margin, I see myself in the bubble. I am distorted slightly by the bubble’s curved surface.  Despite the spin of this mirror, my reflection remains stationary.  This miniature system reflects the Earth, whose rotational spin does not disturb my stationary seat at the creek margin.  The stillness of my image and body in these spinning worlds is, despite the rules of physics, momentarily amazing.  It is amazing especially because my tilt over the water for a best view of the bubble has a delicate equilibrium—I teeter between muscle strain and falling into the water.

Another big bubble slips over the stone lip and through the trough, it rolls over the rump of the cascade to the center of the whirlpool, causing the first big bubble to carom down creek. The delicate equilibrium on the face of the cascade is gone fast. The displaced bubble shoots over the surface of the duodenal water.  What had seemed secure, the bubble spinning, holding to the cascade despite the roil of the water, was easily shot. Little force was involved.

I try to recall lessons I should have learned well. Long ago in a freshman physics course taken during summer school, we experimented to understand vectors, velocities, and collisions—the rules of displacement.  A body’s place is tenuous.  A bubble, holding our image, can slip over the fleshy surface of water at the slightest provocation.  The rules of physics are filled with provocations.

*  *  *

I watched the bubbles in the creek that runs through Devil’s Canyon in west, central Colorado.  It was a day in April in 2006, when I was on sabbatical.  As I prepare for my field season in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, I have been thinking about my experiences in that landscape.

Spring Light