It has been a while. The weather in May was about as good as it gets and June is starting out the same. No complaints. Once again, winter cold damaged the Australian tea trees (Melaleuca alternifolia) and Chilean guavas (Ugni molinae). The newly started banana plants (Musa spp.) and the orange wild rhea (Debregeasia longifolia) had the misfortune of their first winter being a harsh one. Two of the three banana plants are barely putting out new growth but it’s too early to tell if the orange wild rheas will come back and the lemon verbenas (Aloysia triphylla) all died. Too many cold winters in a row.
During a cold snap a while back, an avian visitor returned.
Red-breasted sapsaucker (Sphyrapicus ruber) tapping into the Norway spruce (Picea abies) adjacent to the LSB parking lot driveway. That tree marks the southwest corner of the former Medicinal Herb Garden section G fruit forest, where sapsuckers were regular visitors to the many large trees that used to grow there. Welcome back.
The tapping zone up close.
After several reports of ravens on campus in late winter and early spring, it seems they have moved on. The crows harass them the way they would a hawk or an owl or a raccoon. I’ve found parts of rabbit and squirrel carcasses and some coyote scat recently. Those are good signs, though I haven’t seen a coyote yet this spring. Eagerly awaiting their return.
Late winter and early spring is a good time to harvest wild greens around here. This is hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), a garden weed that makes a fine addition to salads and stir-fried dishes. After flowering, the plants produce cylindrical seed pods called siliques. When they mature they eject their seeds. If you’ve ever weeded these in May or June, you’ve experienced the exploding siliques and probably caught a few seeds in the eyes. So weed them early…and eat hearty.
Public service reminder: this is Italian arum (Arum italicum). Maybe it seems benign in your shady yard. It hasn’t spread (yet) because you don’t disturb the nearby soil or maybe it hasn’t flowered and gone to seed. This picture was taken in early spring; large plants will have flowered and will be producing fruit soon. If you see them, at the very least, harvest the bright orange seedheads (which start out green so are hard to spot) and throw them in the garbage, then wash your hands. Beware and do not get the sap (which contains calcium oxalate crystals) in your eyes or on any mucous membrane for that will be an experience you will not soon forget.
Last year’s bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus) nest on a garden tripod in section F. As the deciduous vines leaf out, new nests will be built in the tripods which are ideal habitat. The thick foliage and crisscrossing vertical and horizontal support wires provide some protection from nest-raiding crows and jays.
Like a couple of whales breaking the surface of the sea, these yellow gentian plants come rearing out of the soil in spring. This picture was taken on March 27 and this…
was taken May 25. The flowers had not yet opened but will soon. Yellow gentian is a bitter tonic herb, good for your digestion, your liver, your gallbladder. If you eat an average American-style diet you are likely eating too many fried and fatty foods and not getting enough bitter foods and green, leafy vegetables. Change your ways and you will feel better.
Starting seeds from wild plants can be easy sometimes but it can be quite difficult at other times. Stubborn persistence sometimes pays off.
In February of 2020, I received fresh seeds of Indian cucumber (Medeola virginiana) from Montreal Botanic Garden and from Tom Clarke at Mount Holyoke College. Over the years I have been keeping seeds in flats longer than I used to. Well, it paid off this time. After three years the seeds in both flats started to come up at the same time…on their fourth winter. The seed flats spent cool and cold months either outside in the unheated garden shed or in a refrigerator, depending on the space I had available. So don’t give up on your seeds. If the seed catalog or your own research tells you it will take time, be patient. Maybe you will need repeat cycles of warm and cold periods, or to sand down or nick the seed coats, pour boiling water on them, ferment them in their fruit pulp or light a small tinder fire over the top of them. Think like a plant in its natural environment. Imagine what it’s like there each month of the year. What conditions, including going through the digestive system of an animal or a forest fire or a flood, do these seeds usually experience? We can never fully crack the code, but we can stumble onto the right combination sometimes. Good enough.
It took two years for the late horse gentian (Triosteum perfoliatum) to come up, and only one plant so far. Maybe next spring the majority of the seeds will come up, or just one more…or none. That’s the wild plant seed germination game for you.
On a cold day in March of 2022, I collected black sage seeds (Salvia mellifera) in California. It took a year for them to start germinating, and that after some cold stratification. Was the cold stratification helpful? No idea. Maybe they would have germinated sooner without it. Anyway, those seedlings and the chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) are large enough to go out to the garden now. Will they survive a bad zone 8b winter? Time will tell.
Chamise plants (Adenostoma fasciculatum), ready to go in the ground. I saw a lot of these growing in the sandy coastal soils. They are widespread in the chaparral landscapes. The dense foliage looked like it would be excellent habitat for many of the little birds in the garden. It gets colder here than there on the central coast so we’ll see how chamise does here in a cold winter.
Paw paw (Asimina triloba) seedlings in the greenhouse. I can’t stop growing them. They are our largest native tree fruit and they are delicious and the trees have a small footprint and fascinating natural history stories. We need paw paw groves on this campus. I used to grow them in the section G fruit forest and they produced many fruit. They would be a natural for the city’s parks because they take up so little space.
Suddenly, the energy that has been stored over winter is starting to find its way to the surface as flowers and foliage.
Flowers on the fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus) on the western edge of the garden. Fringe trees are more or less dioecious, so some plants have female flowers and some have male flowers. That said, some plants also have hermaphroditic flowers mixed in (So I’ve read; I’ve not yet taken the time to investigate). There is a Chinese fringe tree (Chionanthus retusus) about a hundred yards away on the Chemistry Department lawn. It is covered in fruit each summer. Unless there is another fringe tree nearby that has escaped my notice, I assume the herb garden tree is male and pollinating (with the help of some insects) the Chemistry lawn tree.
Snowbush or mountain whitethorn (Ceanothus cordulatus) in the xeriscape bed. I have planted several around the garden and they do well, much better than our native snowbush (Ceanothus velutinus) in my limited experience in the herb garden. They are native to the mountains of California.
If the crossvine (Bignonia capreolata) flowered last year, I can’t remember. It is native to the central and eastern US but does well around here, attracts hummingbirds, would surely cover a chain link fence and it contains the antihypertensive alkaloid reserpine, the only known plant that does, outside of the genus Rauwolfia in the family Apocynaceae. If something about this plant seems familiar, it is related to trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) which is on display in many Seattle gardens. Both are in the Bignoniaceae family.
Orange honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa) slowly encircling Cascara Circle. It grows on both sides of the Cascades but I’ve only noticed it (can’t miss those flowers) on low-elevation early season hikes on the east side, along Ingalls Creek for instance.
Siskiyou lewisia (Lewisia cotyledon) flowers nodding in the breeze. Rabbits have mostly left them alone over the years, and yet I’ve had to protect the wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) and henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) after rabbits started eating them. I think it was the kits who go for shorter, leafy seedling and I’m guessing that would be a costly mistake for a young rabbit.
Western sand cherry (Prunus pumila var. besseyi) is growing quickly. This is its second year. Fingers crossed for fruit which I have eaten and they are good.
Mountain bistort (Polygonum bistorta) prison camp. The rabbits would eat it to the ground if not for the hardware cloth but it’s not a great look. I’m hoping for a return of the coyotes as soon as possible. So far they have proven to be the most effective rabbit predators.
Narrowleaf mule ears (Wyethia angustifolia) growing by the sidewalk near the garden shed. There is a whole bed of it in nearby section C. That bed is surrounded by hardware cloth. Something, either a squirrel or a rabbit was eating the flower heads, after the petals had withered but before the seeds had matured. It’s always something.
Its looks a bit like a goumi shrub (Elaeagnus multiflora) but it is our native soapberry or red buffaloberry (Shepherdia canadensis) which is in the same family, the Eleagnaceae. It is surrounded by hardware cloth because rabbits gnaw off the branches. No fruit because it is generally dioecious and this is the only plant. I haven’t yet eaten a soapberry but many years ago, while hitchhiking back from cannery work in Alaska, I camped at a spot down a sandy, wooded spit by the side of Kluane Lake in the Yukon…right in the middle of a patch of soapberry bushes, during berry season as luck would have it. Rookie mistake. The next morning I strolled down to the lake 50 feet away to fill my pot for coffee. I crossed three new sets of grizzly tracks in the sand, a mother and two cubs. Rather than browse for nutritious soapberries that night, they had detoured to the beach and gone on their way as bears usually do, avoiding humans whenever possible. I recently read that about a decade ago, Yukon had experimented with removing soapberries near campgrounds in some areas, to avoid conflict with the bears.
Last year, the Cascara Circle stream was so clogged with vegetation, mostly bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata), that the water was spilling over the sides of the retaining walls. With an old pruning saw I cut out huge chunks of roots, an incredible amount of plant biomass, big blocks of it, many, many wheelbarrows full. What a relief. Look at that open water!
Top left is green arrow arum (Peltandra virginica) with volunteer sedges, bottom right is water plantain (Alisma plantago-aquatica), bottom left is wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) whose tubers are eaten by humans but also by visiting ducks. That’s why it is growing through hardware cloth.
Cursing my hardware cloth and hopefully eating slugs instead.
Asphodel (Asphodelus albus) near the end of its flowering period. Soon the flower stalks will be covered with large, round fruit (about the size of a Castelvetrano olive) and the stalks will flop into the pathways. That’s when I have to cut them back. Look at that lonesome, scraggly fig branch behind them. The disappearing fig tree. Old timers will remember when that fig tree shaded in half of section B. The garden does not lack for shady places or soil filled with tree roots. If I could I would take out at least a couple dozen big trees from the garden’s perimeter, but that is not an option, so the inside of the garden will have no new big trees on my watch and bird-sown volunteer trees in the borders will be cut as soon as I see them.
The prickly pears (Opuntia spp.) are spreading out into the gravel path a bit. Might have to work them back at some point. Look at the arrowleaf balsamroot flowers (Balsamorhiza sagittata). That high spot on top of pumice and gravel seems like a winner.
Periwinkle (Vinca minor) is widespread in much of the garden border areas. It’s better than English ivy (Hedera helix) because it stays on the ground but still helps to suppress weeds like Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) and snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus). Just kidding…ok I’m not. The ‘northwest natives or die’ planting craze has gotten out of hand. The people who design such landscapes should have to maintain them for a decade or so. Rubus ursinus anyone? The horror.
Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa) with flowers and a new seedhead. It is a shrub of the southwestern US and Mexico but it does well here in full sun and well-drained soil. It’s quite drought and cold tolerant and should be more widely planted.
The monkey protectors of Cascara Circle. When groups are meeting at the garden we often say “Meet you by the monkey poles.” But who are these mysterious monkeys? When I first started volunteering at the garden in the 1990s, I heard or read or both, that the monkeys were guardians of the garden and were modeled after monkey statues at a garden in Padua, Italy. And those statues were copied from Hindu temple gardens in India. That rang a bell. They could be none other than Hanuman, shape-shifting deity, trickster, general of a monkey army and faithful ally of Prince Rama in the Hindu epic Ramayana, though he also appears in another Hindu epic, Mahabharata, both of which are worth your attention if you enjoy epic literature. At one point in the Ramayana, after Rama’s brother Lakshmana is gravely wounded on the battlefield, Hanuman flies off to the medicine mountain in the Himalayas to find the herb that will save him. Because Hanuman did not take a plant systematics class in college, he is at a loss to figure out which is the right plant, so he picks up the entire mountain and carries it back, saving Lakshmana’s life. Hanuman can do it all. He could punt all of the Marvel superheroes at once with a lazy slap of his tail…before breakfast. So watch your step in the garden.
Japanese ardisia, marlberry, zi jin niu (Ardisia japonica) thriving in the abundant shade of section E. It is one of the 50 fundamental herbs in traditional Chinese medicine and is used for lung and liver conditions among other things. It grows like a champ in the shade! I want more plants like marlberry.
This raccoon (Procyon lotor) was finding something it really wanted to eat under the leaves. It was so focused on its mission that it ignored me. Normally I wouldn’t get this close.
I’m surprised the California flannel bushes have persisted so long in the garden. There are five or six and almost all are over 20 years old, comparatively long-lived for Seattle. They are all strategically located in protected spots so that could be part of their success.
California flannel bushes (Fremontodendron californicum) are having a superbloom right now.
The waxy flowers last a long time. If you have a protected, well-drained, sunny spot in your yard you should get one of these shrubs. They’re evergreen, drought-tolerant and I’ve never seen one bothered by insects. They are in the same family as Hibiscus, the Malvaceae or mallow family.
waiting on the seeds
of Indian cucumber
finally paid off
See you in the garden.