Easter Morning Bloomers
April 8th, 2007
Please enjoy this sampling of photographs of some of the native plants blooming on the tree farm this Easter Sunday morning:
Serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia) (Click for larger image, 442 KB)
Wild iris or flags (Iris tenax) (Click for larger image, 194 KB)
Pacific dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) (Click for larger image, 454 KB)
Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) (Click for larger image, 249 KB)
Oregongrape (Berberis aquifolium) (Click for larger image, 208 KB)
Trillium (Trillium ovatum) (Click for larger image, 246 KB)
Happy Easter!
April 8th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Hi! nice flowers, what’s your elevation? (I’m 960′) Happy Easter!
April 8th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
We’re at 800 feet, on the slopes of Mt. Hope above Happy Valley. No kidding.
April 9th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
You live beautifully.
April 9th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Thank you, but someone else set this place up for us.
Every plant pictured was cultivated or tended right here for thousands of years. Every one was used for food, fiber, fuel, medicine, or all of the above.
Flags, for instance, have edible bulbs and their leaves make excellent cordage. Serviceberry bears sweet little fruits and the one-year canes make the best arrowshafts.
Other Kalapuyan plants on the tree farm include white oak (acorns), hazelnut (nuts and basket fibers), camas, tiger lilies, and fawn lilies (starchy roots), strawberries, blackberries, huckleberries, wild cherry, and wild rose (fruit), sedges and rushes (fiber), and many more.
This place was a smorgasboard, a combo grocery/hardware store, a Kalapuyan Walmart. People dug, pruned, picked, burned, and hung out here for uncounted generations.
The grace and labors of ancient caretakers bless us today, right here, on the homeland.
Our joy in the flowers is spontaneous. When their origins are understood, our humility and gratitude become boundless.
April 9th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Ha, I’m a little closer to heaven than you are ;0). When I go to town I go down to about 130′, so it’s fun in spring to watch it go “up” into the hills. We’ve got pretty much the same assortment here.
I enjoy learning about native uses of plants as well. I’ve heard the natives here had the healthiest diet–salmon and huckleberries–sounds good to me!! There are so many different berries here (I’m an addicted berry picker), and fortunately the Himalayan blackberry isn’t so rabid, we still have a good cover of native blackberries. One day I was picking and my UPS man asked me what species of blackberry I had in my bucket, I said native, and he says those make the best pies (yes;0))–it made me smile that in this day you can still find people who know the difference and love a good pie fresh picked off the land.
And I really like pioneer names too, so full of expectation–Sweet Home, Amity, Drain, Mist ;0)
April 9th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Don’t forget Sublimity.
From an ecological perspective it is important to realize that these plant species do not comprise a natural plant community. They are not mutually dependent; in fact they are competitors. They did not arrive here and florish here by dint of Mother Nature.
The plant species here are all utilitarian and were planted here and cultivated here by human beings. The collective plant species are an artificial assemblage, man-made, anthropogenic.
There are a few invasive weeds, like Douglas-fir, that are new to this property. There is one old-growth DF stump on the neighbor’s property, probably the only one in the vicinity. But there are plenty of young DF’s. Douglas-fir has that extra chromosome that makes it into a mutant superweed.
Otherwise, this place was obviously a garden–tended by people since far back in antiquity. By “this place” I mean western Oregon, at a minimum.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Correction: these plant species do not constitute a natural plant community.
The rule is: The whole comprises the parts, whereas the parts constitute or make up the whole. From Lyn Dupré, Bugs In Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose, 1995, Addison-Wesley.
April 17th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
“The rule is: The whole comprises the parts, whereas the parts constitute or make up the whole. From Lyn Dupré, Bugs In Writing: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose, 1995, Addison-Wesley. ”
English Majors!
April 17th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
And yet my degrees are in forestry and statistics! The English Languish is free for all, however, and can be shaped like wet clay into whatever you want.
Lyn’s book is a lot of fun, for a grammar primer. See my review (here).