Category Archives: wildflowers

Best views and favorite people.

family, travel, wildflowers, , , , , , , , , ,

Pretty sure it was the quickest trip by plane I’ve ever made, my flight to San Diego and back, all in less than 60 hours. I went for my granddaughter Maggie’s graduation from Point Loma Nazarene University, which offers the guests at the ceremony an expansive view of the Pacific Ocean and the sky above. The weather cooperated; the day before, our view would likely have been obscured by fog and clouds.

But the brightest sun beat down on us that day, and having forgotten my hat, I shaded my face with a program throughout the ceremony. Before the ceremony, for which we arrived very early as to get the best amphitheater seats, I found myself holding a venerable copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that possibly Maggie was planning to return to the school library. I made the most of my opportunity and read “The Water of Life,” which is a story I’d been wanting to read for some time.

Maggie had most of her immediate family and many favorite people around her on her happy day, and we were and are terribly proud of her. It was a reunion as well as a celebration, as everyone in our group came in from somewhere else, three states represented, and we stayed in a house together across from the beach.

Maggie

Before and after the main event, we enjoyed the ocean and the beautiful campus, wonderful conversations, and lots of snuggling focused on my great-granddaughter Lora. She is of course the fourth generation from me, and all of those in her line were gathered, which was sweet!

White Bird of Paradise

Everywhere I looked I noticed many and various plants that mostly don’t grow where I live, or don’t get as huge. I learned just now that the White Bird of Paradise, Strelitzia nicolai, is a different variety from the colorful ones, and that’s why the many such plants around our Airbnb house were taller than the two-story buildings. The lantana in the back yard grew higher than my head.

Bird of Paradise, Strelitzia reginae
Australian Tea Tree
Two types of eucalyptus trees.
Coral Tree
Princess Flower, Tibochina heteromalla, South America

Early on the morning of Mother’s Day, we were clearing out and leaving to catch our planes, etc., but the day before, the two women who aren’t yet mothers gave the mothers among us roses. I carried mine home in my backpack, their stems gathered in wet paper towels tied up in a plastic bag.

Pearl, Maggie and friend arrived at my house soon after I got home, by a complex turn of events, so our happiness continued for two more days in a different climate. Yesterday we four took an evening walk in the nearby hills where I continued to find plants  I didn’t know, or rather, as is often the case, that I didn’t know that I knew.

My Seek app tells me that I identified the Yellow Glandweed, Bellardia viscosa, a year ago this month, but I’m guessing from the location recorded back then that I saw one or a few flowers, and not as we experienced last night, of thousands and thousands of them spread up and down the slopes.

Yellow Glandweed

Maggie’s friend had never been in northern California before, and his sincere interest got Pearl and me talking more than we normally would about the natural history of this area especially. About poison oak, and oak trees, the California Bay Laurel, and Lace Lichen, which I had to look up again to remember what it is exactly.

Lace Lichen is truly a lichen, but Spanish Moss is not a moss: it is a bromeliad. As the latter plant is not native here and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it, I won’t confuse myself any further by showing a picture of Spanish Moss. I may have seen it on Maui, where is is also not native but is reportedly “often confused with the native Hawaiian plant called hinahina, which is a silvery-gray native heliotrope used in lei making.” Lace Lichen:

Lace Lichen

The lichen that hangs from these trees is food for the deer and nesting material for the birds. If you look at it closely you would not confuse it with the bromeliad.

Blow Wives

The young people especially thought the golden California hills, the oaks and the bay trees most beautiful. They climbed up on the thick trunks the way our children, and some of us parents, always do. We all strolled through the grass and among the strange yellow flowers. It was a balmy walk in the hills at the end of the day when the air was still warm and our shadows were long.

Now my guests are gone, but my roses remain,
reminding me of my ever-expanding, most blessed motherhood.

This walk required two pair of boots.

beauty, nature, wildflowers, , , , , , , , , ,
mallow

This evening I made it out for a walk, which turned into two walks, because of something new I saw on my usual route. I stopped at the bridge to look down at the seasonal creek that is getting low… and up at all the bushes and trees growing out of it. Every few years the city maintenance crew dredges out these waterways, but right now everything is growing lush and thick.

The willows are the tallest plant that grows down there, and buckeyes are numerous. What was that I saw climbing up in the tallest willow bushes? White flowers… if I only had a better camera, or even binoculars… I pointed my Seek app at the flowers and it said Lady Banks’ Rose. Even as poorly as I could make them out, that didn’t seem right.

The roses were growing in the area in the middle of the creek bed, between two creeks right where they join to become one. I thought I would try to go down closer to the water where there is a jumble of unpaved dry-season paths that some people run on with their dogs, and a few children explore. Also there is a sloping cement driveway of sorts for the maintenance vehicles, that is submerged in the winter. Two paved creekside paths also meet at the bridge. But when I got to the place where I would cross the southern stream to get to that middle area, the rocks were covered with algae, and it all seemed too muddy and messy for me to attempt while wearing my new boots.

So I came home and looked up Lady Banks Roses. They did not at all resemble what I’d seen; I guess they were too distant for Seek to make out. The bright idea occurred to me: Why not change into my old boots that I was thinking of giving away, and go back? Why not, indeed?

lemon balm

When I arrived at the crossing place again I had to squish through the mud and the algae, but with only a few steps I was over, and my old boots were mostly waterproofed and barely noticed.

watercress

My, what a lot of plants in that mid-creek jungle! Once before I walked down there, but it was in September when everything starts drying up. The roses today were growing in the middle of the willows, honeysuckle, horsetail grass, fennel and bedstraw.

Watercress, Greater Plantain, and Bermuda Grass

Many of the plants are naturalized from backyard escapees. The Bermuda grass for sure, and the lemon balm, and the roses. Wild blackberry brambles snagged my clothes and grabbed at my hair, but I managed to feel my way with my feet along the edge of the creek that was hidden by bullrushes, right up close to the flowers I wanted to see better.

When Seek could assess the image better it identified it as Rosa multiflora or Rosa polyantha, a native of eastern Asia. It also told me I’d observed it two years ago near my daughter Pippin’s place in the farther north part of the state. These roses were to me the prettiest thing in all that jungle.

It really made my day to make this little excursion and discover who they were, and to meet as well many of their companions in the creek. I think I’ll hold on to my old boots.

Flowers wild or exotic.

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mystery plant

Pippin drove the younger children and me to the same botanical garden we visited two years ago, but several weeks earlier in the spring. Before looking at the plants in the garden itself, we briefly explored an area of the larger park down by the Sacramento River, which is roaring through its narrow channel in the town of Dunsmuir.

On trees growing at the river’s edge, Ivy found dozens of exoskeletons that Seek tells us are of the California Giant Stonefly. They were certainly the giantest fly of any kind I’ve ever seen. Pippin thinks the flies exited these skins last year, because it’s too early in this spring for it to have happened recently.

California Giant Stonefly

We saw poison oak and regular oak, and several wildflowers along the riverside path, including annual honesty, which is in the mustard family. And nearby, last year’s seed pod, now a faded moon.

Lunaria annua – Annual Honesty

Up the hill, rhododendrons!

Blaney’s Blue Rhododendron

Dogwoods layered with Japanese maples and rhododendrons make a beautiful scene.

The big lawn around which the garden is arranged is a setting for recreational events, and there were lots of poles and wires and big boxes of electrical equipment that interfered with our photography, but not with our appreciation of the display of plants, which included various other shrubs native to the Far East, like this Japanese Andromeda (Pieris japonica):

Japanese Andromeda

The other favorite exotic was the Dove Tree, or Handkerchief Tree (Davidia involucrata), native to China:

Behind the dogwoods and smaller trees, tall conifers form a backdrop.

Dogwood

If there had not been a chill breeze blowing up from the river, I might have plopped myself down on that lawn to gaze at dogwood trees for a half hour. I forget about their existence for years at a time, and then am blown away all over again by their beauty. There are at least eight species of dogwoods to enjoy there. From the garden’s website:

Cornus nuttallii, Mountain or Pacific Dogwood, is the emblematic tree of the City of Dunsmuir and the Dunsmuir Botanical Gardens. They are native to the Gardens and the surrounding area. What appear to be flower petals are actually bracts – petal-like modified leaves. The (mostly) inconspicuous true flowers are ringed by four to eight of the showy, white bracts. In fall as the flower ovaries develop and set buds, they turn a bright yellow with red seeds.

Mountain Dogwood

At last, we did have to leave.
And I will say good-bye for now
with the simple Western Starflower:

Western Starflower

The cutest pine trees.

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It’s a rainy afternoon at Pippin’s, where I am now, having journeyed up the state and into the mountains a couple of days ago.

The Professor has been waiting for wet weather in which to set fire to his burn pile, which has grown larger than ever with the addition of large tree limbs broken in the snow.

I was able to help Ivy and Jamie a tiny bit by forking clumps of wet leaves into carts, from a leaf pile across the yard, for them to haul to the fire.

Ivy had just pulled a batch of popovers out of the oven when their dad called all the children out to help.

Yesterday I took two walks, first with Jamie and later with Scout. The forest floor is covered with pine cones, and also with cute sprouts of Ponderosa pine, each topped with the seed or seed case, presumably from which it sprouted.

Ivy peeled a few of them for me to eat, and one looked and tasted something like a commercial pine nut.

The pink and white flowered manzanitas are in bloom all around, and the Squaw Carpet lovely in violet.

Pippin drove a few of us even farther north to do another fun thing in the rain, but I will come back later to tell you about that. Completing a post on my phone is a challenge, and I want to publish this one before something goes wrong!