botanizing

Mountain scents

Lime, I think.  I have put my nose in the flower wand of beargrass.  The fragrance is fruity—pungently so, richly citrusy—like a lime, I think.  Squeeze a wedge of lime—just before dropping it in your drink—and that is beargrass in full flower.

We lack a vocabulary for scents.  We steal from nouns for fragrance, making them fruity or skunky.  Or we simply take a word to convey displeasure at odor, such as foul.  Our language—at least English—lacks words specific to scents.  I can think of no special word, aside from skunky, that calls universally to mind a scent.  The paucity of words limits our sense of fragrance.  Understanding is robbed by missing vocabulary.

The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom we know best for his Social Contract and Confessions and for the notion of the noble savage, his sense that civilization corrupted humans, lamented the lack of names for smells.  Rousseau botanized ardently and was said never to have collected a plant without smelling it.  It was also said that Rousseau could recognize plants by their smells alone.

High in mountains, I walk across the headwaters of Gedney Creek.  At a creek crossing, I take a long step to a flat-topped stone at the water’s surface and a second long step to a midstream clump of willows, then hop to a boulder top, and lope finally to the other bank.  Above the creek, there is a swale that is edged by mountain ash, a small tree that has a trunk no wider than two fingers.  The branches of the mountain ash, heavy with hemispherical clumps of small white flowers, droop.  This relative of the rose smells strongly but not with a rose’s scent.  As I approach the band of small trees, I think the smell is animal—perhaps a long dead animal.  I grab a few of the mountain ash flowers to rub them in my fingers below my nose.  I breathe and wonder at the foul smell.  It is the odor of very dirty, once wet and then long stashed laundry.

Above the swale on a drier, open slope of low shrubs, I breathe sorbet and sort among the flowers to find it.  It is neither thimbleberry or rose nor the blue-flowered penstemon.  Not mountain heath.  The sweet, lightly fruity fragrance is false azalea, a cousin of the mountain heath.  The false azalea flowers are little bottles tipped upside down on elegant stalks that curve out and around below sprays of emerging leaves from the tips of branches.  I cup leaves and branch tip in my hand to smell the flowers, which leaves a sticky spot on my nose.  There is a sticky film on my fingers.  I take a leaf for a closer look with my hand lens.  There are glandular hairs on the leaf—each hair has a swollen tip that glistens in the sun from its sticky exudate, which is probably similar to the nectar made in the flowers.  The leaf ‘nectar’ might have a smell of its own if I could gather enough for a whiff.  My fingers smell still of the flower’s sorbet.

Another sweetness is broad and strong higher on the slope.  Tall shrubs hang over the trail.  The mountain balm, a Ceanothus known also as wild lilac, a name than conveys the strength of the plant’s scent, has scepter-like branches that seem dipped in honey.  Delicate, white flowers are clustered like swollen drops, bulb-tipped and ready to drip, at the tips of the branches.  To smell the flowers is to put your nose in a jar of honey.  The sweet fragrance diffuses across the high slope.

I walk uphill, back into forest and over small patches of snow, where rivulets of water flow down the trail.  There are steep switchbacks, and I stop to rest and breathe deeply every few steps.  Then I emerge from treeline into high meadow, where matted sedges and grasses are just now standing, released by snow melt.  The mountain pasqueflowers are in bloom, and I kneel for a deep smell.  Nothing, I think.  Nothing more than wet soil and fresh grass.  Nothing but a tickle, the only offering for my nose, from the pasqueflower’s hairy tepals.

Cornus canadensis

Cedar groves

In the shady, moist cedar groves, the thimbleberries are spindly.  Their leaves have the texture of skin.  These leaves, extending upward on long petioles from stiff canes, catch sun flecks among the hard shadows of the cedars.  These shadowy groves are places of white flowers.  Although not yet out, flowers of the thimbleberries will be white.  The miner’s lettuce has been flowering for weeks.  Its thin white petals nearly tear when simply touched.  The bead lily has thick white tepals. These have a line of fuzz along their length.  Tepals of some of bead lilies are just spreading and others are fully open.  I look in the open bead lilies.  Their stamens have opened, splitting inwardly, letting dusty yellow pollen fall among the tepals. In the lowest shadows of cedar groves, there are wild ginger flowers.  They do not hold-out white flowers like most of the other plants.  The wild gingers have nearly hidden flowers, which lie on the ground.  Amid dank  and detritus, where decay fumes away, the deep burgundy flowers of the wild ginger, like a bit of rot themselves, await flies and maybe beetles.

Notes:
The first photograph is an opening flower of bead lily (Clintonia uniflora) and the second is a leaf of thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus).

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.

The Widening Gyre / The Narrowing Ring

For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.
From the first crescent to the half, the dream
But summons to adventure, and the man
Is always happy like a bird or a beast;

        William Butler Yeats
        From “The Phases of the Moon”

There is a half-moon this afternoon.  I walk in bright sun, under the white, waxing moon, along the Selway River.  Where they are exposed to sun, the shoulders of rock outcrops are perches for nests of moss, lichen, and club moss in which buttercups flower.  The orangey yellow petals of the buttercups reflect the sun in white shines. There are larkspurs on other stones.  Their flowers have not yet opened—the buds could be miniature cones of boysenberry ice cream.  Four, round-topped scoops to each cone.  The gravel pockets around the outcrops have numerous spring whitlow grasses, which are tiny mustards.  Each flower has four cleft petals, and the few flowers of each plant stand on a stalk as thin as thread.

The trail curves to a creek.  There is a cedar grove along the creek.  A trail crew has recently passed through. They have used chainsaws to open the trail, clearing a passage through the trees that fell during the winter.  The cut faces of the fallen cedar are fresh, the wood still orange and unweathered, and I stop to count the rings of one.  From center to bark the cut trunk is the span of my two hands together with fingers spread, a radius of 16 1/2 inches.  I count 105 rings where the cut was made 15 feet above the base of the fallen cedar.  The early years were lush times.  The growth rings of those years are wide. The temperatures must have been cool and the rains abundant.  The later rings narrow.  Climate has tightened on these cedars—the rains have diminished, and the temperatures have warmed; there was much less growth in the last 30 years of this tree, where the rings are tight upon one another, than in its first 60 years.

On the ground in the cedar grove, I find a broken snail shell.  Some predator has chipped away one face of the shell, but the columella—the central stalk around which the shell curves—is intact and has a helical fringe along its length.  The helical curve of the columella—a nacreous gyre—with a shadowy cavity near its top, offering a hint of passage to some dark infinity, makes me think of the poet William Butler Yeats.

Yeats, after a spell of automatic writing, sought to explain the universe, or at least the symbolism of poetry and the passage of history, in gyres.  I recall Will Jumper, the professor in a poetry course I once took, diagramming Yeats’s gyres on a blackboard.  Jumper’s hands shook with age by that time, making the gyres have jitters.  The diagram of Yeats’s gyres consisted of two superposed cones.  The cones, which Yeats called vortices, because he must have imagined them swirling around, tracing a gyre from point to broad top, were the same size; but one cone pointed one direction and the other the other; thus, one cone converged to a point where the other was broadest.  Yeats explained all of this in his book A Vision, in which he constructed from his superposed cones, one a vortex of discord and the other a vortex of concord, a new astrology, based on the phases of the moon and the symbolism of the body, that was both retrospective, offering a reading of history, and prospective, offering a prophecy for the future.

Part of that prophecy was described by Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming.” “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” Yeats tells us, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”  The discord in the widening gyre would lead to ‘a second coming’ when evil, incarnate as a “rough beast,” imagined to be sphinx-like, would at birth slouch toward Bethlehem.

I slouch under a cedar that leans toward the Selway River to have a late lunch.  An otter swims upriver.  The sleek otter, its body an umber line from head to the long, sharp V of its tail, is hardly a sphinx, but the widening gyres of Yeats’s “Second Coming” turn in my thoughts.

The gyres in which Yeats found himself dated from 1050 A.D., a phase of history, he noted, in which “faith no longer sufficed.”  It was an age of trouble, when Gothic architecture suppressed freedom, and as his contemporary phase curved, gyre after gyre, to his own time, he was, he wrote, “filled with excitement.”  In his time . . . “Having bruised their hands upon that limit, men, for the first time since the seventeenth century, see the world as an object of contemplation, not as something to be remade, and some few, meeting the limit in their special study, even doubt if there is any common experience, doubt the possibility of science.”

I think about the experience of tree rings.  Each cedar in this forest will make largely matching rings out of their common experiences over the years.  We can read the good years and the bad, but they make no prophecies.  We know how climate and rainfall make rings wide or narrow, we can predict tight rings if we forecast hot years and little rain.  But prediction is not prophecy, and we have built our knowledge of tree rings out of ages of experimentation with tree growth (rather than automatic writing).  Although I delighted in thinking about Yeats’s gyres and poems as I walked, what we can trace in nature through the possibilities of science is much richer than his mystical constructions.

Bluebells, which have pushed recently through the duff, are surely a delight as great at the poetry of Yeats.  As I walk downriver, I contemplate the pitch of their elegant blue flowers.

*  *  *
Notes

I walked along the Selway on Saturday, 12 April.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . .” is from the poem “The Second Coming” published by W. B. Yeats in 1921.

I have quoted extensively from W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, which was published in 1938 in the United States by McMillan.  These quotes include the epigraph taken from the poem/chapter “The Phases of the Moon” and materials from the chapter “Dove or Swan.”

Green

Green has begun.

Snowmelt has allowed the wheat to grow.  Although green through the winter beneath the snow, exposure to sun and rain and warmer days must surely have urged the wheat leaves to make new chlorophyll.  The swoops of hills are green pools. The color is more that of algal bloom than agricultural field.

As I drove across the state last weekend, the riparian galleries caught my attention.  They flashed yellow green.  The new leaves along the ochre branches of cottonwoods were parallelograms—they had pointed tips and a span of lamina held in the V of spreading brown bud scales.  Yellow green also spotted the red, wand-like branches of willows.

Slipping into Spring

I carefully pick my steps.  The forested north side of the hill I walk still has snow.  Under the trees and shrubs the snow is thin. There is more on the trail.  A thick dust of crystalline snow slides from my steps on the trail.  This snow dust remains from snowfalls on Wednesday and Thursday nights and it lies on top of several inches of snow that have been tightly compacted by walkers over the winter months.  Beneath the snow surface, ice squeals and its radiating cracks expand—‘plank,’ I hear, and ‘plank’ as the weight of my footfall forces the cracks outward.   The walk is slippery on the trail than angles upward over the steep slope.

When I reach the ridge, I continue westward.   On the landscape below, lower loessal hills look like waves in a broad sea.  These standing waves slope to the southwest, and each has a sharp crest, falling to a northeastern trough.  As if breaking waves of water, each crest has a white lip—but these are frozen crests, and the white is a lip of snow held in the northern shadow of each little hill.

As I walk along the open ridge, I begin to find buttercups (Ranunculus glaberrimus) in flower among the stones and grasses.  These first buttercups of the season always please me.  I walk downslope below the trail to look for other plants in flower.   A few plants of Gray’s biscuitroot (Lomatium grayi) have begun to flower.  Their yellow-flowered umbels are still tight as if huddled against the cool wind that streams across the ridge. 

Despite the bright yellow buttercups, my attention is drawn to clustered spires of new green leaves.  The clumps of new leaves are numerous.  The pointed leaves are four to five centimeters long, and I think initially that they might be onions. I break a leaf and crush it beneath my nose.  It’s not onion. These, I realize, are leaves of the blue-eyed grass (Olsynium or Sisyrinchium).  The stiff leaf spires, like Gothic pinnacles, aspire to light and air.