Tag Archives: Northern California

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!

Looking at Shasta and lichens.

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The thermometer hovered at the freezing point all day, everywhere we went. The places we explored, though, were out of the woods and piles of snow, in more arid expanses dotted with rocky hillocks and juniper trees.

The volcanic peak of Mount Shasta rose high above the rest of the land to the south. Closer to the ground, lichens and mosses grew thickly on rocks.

We ate a snacky lunch on the highest pile of boulders, and the children scrambled up and down and climbed rock faces with bare hands that eventually turned red and numb with cold.

I was surprised at how the slightest breeze cut right through my several layers of under and outer winter garments. It was so gorgeous, I wished we could have roamed for more hours. Maybe in another season.

We departed as the sun was going down and taking its tiny bit of warmth from us. The first day of 2022 had been pretty nice!

My birthday Christmas in March.

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My birthday hasn’t yet arrived, but since I’m unlikely to see any of my children on the proper day, the family I was with just a few days ago gave me a celebration. (Soldier had planned to come here from Colorado with Liam one day, but he wisely cancelled that trip.) Presumably we’ll all be holed up apart from one another when I cross over to a new age.

The first special thing Pippin did was to drive me and the children to a succulent farm she’d been wanting to visit. We took a picnic and ate on the way; it took us a while, as it’s in Fort Jones, sort of in the middle of “nowhere,” and not a place that succulents would grow naturally, but the whole operation is in greenhouses. Maybe some of you have ordered from Mountain Crest Gardens. If you like succulents, you would have feasted your eyes on the long rows of charming species and collections.

One of them I did not find charming, only strange:

Pippin wanted to get me a few for my birthday and I chose these that are different from anything I already have:

I put them in my car to keep them safe, and I checked on them one day to see that they weren’t getting too cold. I didn’t notice then that the one on the right had evidently gotten too cold, and no wonder. My car looked like this one of those mornings.

I knew I wouldn’t be keeping that plant outdoors in the winter here, and I don’t know why I didn’t have more sense about how cold it would get in my car. At least, it is only damaged, not killed. Scout also came home with a little succulent, and Ivy collected various leaves and stems off the greenhouse floor which I told her were likely to grow into plants if they were in dirt, so she put them all together in one pot when she came home.

The second birthday surprise was nothing anyone could have planned: a big snowfall of the powderiest sort, followed by a morning when we could easily walk down the road a few paces to a good spot for sledding. That day Jamie had looked out the window and beamed, “It feels like Christmas!” and when I asked why, he said because of the snow.

I realized then how special a treat it was, after their relatively dry winter, that this dumping of perfectly fun snow should happen while I was there, and actually, on the perfect day. I had tried to make my visit other weeks that should have been more wintry. Now, in the middle of March, came my birthday gift from God.

If not for the children, I’d have been happy to look at the snow through the window, but being able to accompany them and watch them literally throw themselves into it was the joy and the gift.

They were thankful for this late snow because when it was Christmas on the calendar their family had just returned from my house and collapsed sick. They couldn’t even eat their Christmas cookies that had been laid by.

As we were pulling on our snow boots and rummaging around for the bibs and gloves, Scout said, “When we come back we can have tea with leftover Christmas cookies!”

Jamie broke trail heading for the little hill alongside the railroad track, and soon the children had smoothed out a sledding run. But after a while they all seemed to like as well merely rolling down the railroad embankment, or in the case of Ivy, just diving and splashing around in the snow, eating it.

Two days before, I had walked through the forest with the children, trying to identify species of lichens, and noticing stages of manzanita growth or death. This day the manzanita blooms were set in fluffy white.

On the embankment next to where freight trains run many times a day, snowballs form on their own, maybe from the wind of the train rushing past?

We did go home and eat those Christmas cookies and drink our tea. The Professor blew a path through the snow for me to walk on back to where I was sleeping, in a sort of guest cottage across the street. The next morning  the scene showed my tracks with no new snow.

Too many of my children have moved to where the winters are cold and snow is common, and the older I get, the more I try to avoid visiting them during the winter. I should try to remember that every visit I have had in snowy weather has been fun; remember the last time when I taught Liam and Laddie to make snowballs? This week’s snow made good snowballs, too! It was another blessed birthday to remember. ❤