I am off for another
field adventure, to teach, give a talk, show my art, and all in the amazing
Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon. These are not the majestic Sierra,
nor the emerald Cascades, but rather a mosaic of many rivers and old eroded landscapes,
where the influence of glaciers has been minimal, and because of this and other
factors, the plant diversity is great. Darlingtonia,
Darmera, Vancouveria, Calochortus,
Trillium, violets, butterworts, calypso,
coralroot, and lady slipper orchids!
Here on Lopez, the day
before the 4th of July, the sun is just working its way through the
clouds, clouds that dropped a heavy load of moisture on hopefully not-too-unhappy
campers early this morning. The moist air, the cool of it all, reminds me of my
first trip to the Siskiyous. I was working for The Nature Conservancy out of
Portland, with my Bachelor’s degree still freshly pocketed, and had heard about
how interesting the Siskiyous were. One weekend Bonnie Brunkow, my dog, and I
piled into Jack Poff’s VW bug for the five hour drive south. Bonnie, who later
served many years as the Director of the Leach Botanical Garden; Jack, who was
the gardener for the Berry Botanical Garden; and Tuka, who proved to be “best
dog ever”. I remember the trip as being gray and rainy, like today, but though our
clothes where damp, our spirits danced to the music of serpentine landscapes
and to us, exotic habitats with their fascinating
plants.
Darlingtonia, for
example. The cobra lily or “California” pitcher plant, Darlingtonia californica, occurs
in some extensive fens (bog-like wetlands that occur on slopes, less acidic
than bogs, with a different suite of accompanying mosses) in the vicinity of
Eight Dollar Mountain, where I teach through the Siskiyou Field Institute. The
cobra-like leaves entice in the neighborhood midges and spiders (from my poetic
point of view) with cathedral deception: the hooded tops of the leaves have
clear “windows” that must, from the fly’s perspective, look like stained glass.
What to do but to fly towards these beauteous panes? …only to bump into the
hood’s ceiling, and be lured downward into the tube, but alas! …downward-pointing
hairs making escape impossible, and decent into the pool of insect-dissolving
enzymes inevitable.
To the insect the fen
may be a dangerous place, with carnivorous pitcher plants, as well as
butterworts (Pinguicula macroceras), their
leaves that act like fly paper, or Drosera
rotundifolia, with leaves that catch
small flies and other insects with round “dew drop” glands on its leaves (thus
the name sun dew?), not to mention the presence of other non-photosynthetic
carnivores (such as the yellow-legged frog?...).
But
to the botanist the fen is a wonderland. Imagine being in a land whose
serpentine soils are desert-like, due to their non-garden-like qualities: baked
dry and hard in the summer, and sticky wet in the spring, where the harsh
iron-magnesium-nickel environment discourages most plants from growing or at
least thriving, such that bare ground is not unusual. And in the midst of this
gray-green desert is the oasis of the fen, heralded by the sweet fragrance of
western azalea (Rhododendron occidentalis)
and the beauty of a showy native orchid, Cypripedium
californicum.
