It’s true. Seattle is now zone 9a. That’s the word from the USDA. Even so, we’ve had two winters in a row with temperatures in the middle-low teens for extended periods. The special challenge we face here has to do with cold air that funnels down the Fraser Valley in Canada and occasionally creeps over into Whatcom County and south to nudge our temperate marine air out of the way and park its arctic self right here on the general area and the Medicinal Herb Garden in particular for days or even weeks. Feels like 8b to me.
A frozen cascade from the cistern is a rare winter curiosity in a garden with a mild maritime climate. That’s the Cascara Circle cistern drain pipe during our January freeze.
That ice is four inches thick. I could stand on it solidly. The small inlet of Lake Washington near the Washington Park Arboretum’s Graham Visitors Center was the scene of ice hockey games for a few days. That’s a rarity but an appropriate gift considering the cold air is from the land of hockey.
Again? Yes the Australian tea trees (Melaleuca alternifolia) got knocked back to the ground yet again by our prolonged temperatures in the teens. I had them covered with tarps and leaves and bubble wrap for the duration of the cold snap but prolonged cold is prolonged cold. Hopefully they will grow back from the stump one more time…in our zone 9a paradise.
Remember the boxing scene in Cool Hand Luke, when Dragline keeps knocking Luke down, punch after punch. Somehow Luke manages to get up each time, looking increasingly worse for wear. Let’s say Dragline is our regular arctic blast of air and Luke is our Australian tea trees.
Sometimes on winter mornings, from the eastern edge of the garden at the appropriately named Rainier Vista, this is the view at sunrise…
the same scene from nearby just a few minutes earlier. That would be Mount Rainier. Lenticular clouds like these are a common sight over the mountain.
A bumper crop of olives (Olea europaea) in 2022 led to a bummer crop in 2023. This is one of the few, left to ripen on the tree. I wonder if any of our local fauna would eat an olive off the tree. Awfully bitter but so are some acorns and squirrels eat them.
Partially obscured by foliage and away from footpaths, this old bench abides just outside the northeast corner of the garden. It is nearly a century old and was placed there a few years after her death in 1921. Born in 1856, her name was Susan Johnson before she took Henry as her last name (and Mrs. Horace as her first. What a strange practice that seems, looking back from the third decade of the 21st century. But remember that women were not even allowed to vote in the US until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920). Anyway, they sure knew how to build benches back then. It’s made of concrete and it has a lot of life left in it.
In the woods north of Cascara Circle, it looks like another rabbit met a quick end. One shake from a coyote usually does the job and they don’t leave much behind. We are so lucky to have a healthy population of coyotes (Canis latrans) in Seattle and especially on campus, though they mostly pass through at night or twilight. Speaking of twilight, I have no photo of a varied thrush (Ixoreus naevius) but they seem to be everywhere on campus this winter, their single-pitched whistle dominating the morning soundscape…in a good way, really a lovely, peaceful sound.
Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) on a winter day. Most of the grains in the grain bed got eaten by birds. The seeds of sorghum are too big and hard for the little birds. Sometimes squirrels or rats eat them. By now they might have.
Bush anemone (Carpenteria californica) looking a bit ragged after our big freeze. Another one 20 feet away looks fresh as a daisy. Why? The other one gets a bit more sun later in the day and maybe a bit less wind. That’s a guess. Like most garden questions there are answers and other answers, mere letters to fill the space of unknowing.
February 8, cornelian cherry flowers (Cornus mas). You might wonder how these winter flowers are getting pollinated with so few insects moving about. Cornelian cherry flowers are hermaphroditic, meaning they have both male and female parts and can pollinate themselves in the absence of pollinators. I’ve seen hummingbirds feeding from their flowers. As Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) increase their year-round range northward along our Pacific coast, have any winter/early-spring-flowering plants increased their fruitfulness? Or has the simultaneous decline in pollinator insects acted as a counterbalance? No idea.
February 8, first osoberry/Indian plum flowers (Oemleria cerasiformis) have a tougher go of it as the plants are dioecious, meaning there are plants that have male flowers and other plants that have female flowers. Only the female flowers produce fruit and only after they have received pollen from male flowers. About 6% of flowering plant species (angiosperms) are dioecious.
Soaptree yucca (Yucca elata) and sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) in section C. I limbed them up because it was impossible to get in there to weed them without risking an eye, a lot of blood or both. Desert plants are good self defenders. I wear leather gloves and safety glasses when I work around them.
In winter, the garden of plants becomes a garden of plant signs and hardware cloth fencing to keep the rabbits out. Such is a public garden.
This Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is dead and the woodpeckers know it. This is the east side…
and this is the west. What’s their plan? If they keep chipping away the top will topple. I steer clear of that tree.
Speaking of woodpeckers, this is the work of acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus). Those are acorns stored in holes they’ve drilled into the bark of a large oak tree that serves as a pantry. Unfortunately this picture is not from campus but off a country road along the central coast of California. Acorn woodpeckers range from Oregon and a sliver of southern Washington to Colombia, with several subspecies in between. I might have spied one with the binoculars but could not get a good view. They are described as clown-faced, which they are, but not in a scary clown way. They now sparsely inhabit Klickitat County, along our border with Oregon, but let’s coax these excellent birds further north in Washington by planting more of our beautiful, long-lived, native Garry oaks (Quercus garryana).
A palisade of Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum) in section C. Not much protection from them; they snap off at the base like balsa wood but they’re good shelter for insects in winter. As go the insects so go we.
White sage (Salvia apiana) can survive many winters in a sheltered, sunny, well-drained soil in Seattle. But the low teens can be a show stopper. We’ll see what comes back in the spring.
Compass plant (Silphium laciniatum) in winter looks like it belongs on a coat of arms or atop an iron gate of an old haunted house. Its curled leaves are winter hideouts for insects. A messy, jumbled winter garden with lots of plant debris like stalks and leaves and seedheads is a healthy garden providing food and shelter for insects and birds. Let it be.
I think this is insect egg slime mold (Leocarpus fragilis). It’s growing on the English ivy (Hedera helix) and spreading onto the old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba).
In section B there is a short section of one graveled path that is bright green and mossy. Is there a broken pipe down there? A pot of gold? Who can say? These are winter questions. Soon it will be spring.
A couple of posts ago, in June of 2023, there was a picture of one late horse gentian seedling (Triosteum perfoliatum) that had come up in May, after two years experiencing seasonal changes of warm and cold. I suspected the balance of the seeds, or at least a lot more, would come up after another warm spell followed by a cold spell. They did just that in late November. This photo was taken on December 15. The Maryland sanicle (Sanicula marilandica) to the left received cold then warm then cold then warm and popped up during its third cold period, outside in the garden shed in November, around the same time as the Triosteum…
and the hairy Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum pubescens). You can see from the label my latest shorthand for such seeds, wcwcw (warm,cold)…repeat until seedlings emerge or you breathe your last or the forest fires are burning overhead or the rising seas are lapping at your propagation bench…you get the picture.
Here, a month later, are Sanicula in front and Triosteum behind.
Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) seedpods drying in the greenhouse on January 4…
and on January 8…
and on January 16.
The day before my flight to sunny California, this was my parting view of the garden shed door. Someone smashed a window, trying to break in. Luckily, the locks require a key to lock or unlock so they couldn’t get in. I requested a repair before heading south and when I got back it was fixed. Thank you to the glass shop for the replacement.
One of these lights is not like the others. That is the Snow Moon over the Biology Greenhouse on February 23 at about 6:40 AM, waxing gibbous, one day short of full.
hydroelectric
salmon rivers light the sky
under snow moon’s glow
See you in the garden.