Camas Fields Forever

For two weeks in a row, I've been blessed with fieldwork in a sublime Cascadian meadow. This last time, I encountered other western Washington folks who'd made the trip top see the legendary camas bloom--the place is so famed for this blue lily that it's common name is Camasland. Last week was the time to see the bloom at its peak, when the flowers are so thick that swaths of meadows turn blue; I offer these photos (which are pathetic  stand-ins for the real scene) to those who missed the day. Explorer accounts back to Lewis and Clark speak of camas meadows that appeared to be lakes, although to my own eye (connected to a mind that demands less sense) the biggest areas of camas looked like pools of sky, complete with fluffy white clouds of American Bistort.

Camas is just the best known of many plants in this meadow that are important to native people. This meadow is a treasure to the Wenatchi and other tribes that came here generation after generation, congregating in large numbers to harvest the roots, socialize, and later light the fires that kept the meadow from reverting to forest.  The soil is black from thousands of fires, dark rich testament to centuries and millenia of tending to this special island of meadow in the Cacadian treed terrain.

While the blue may look more like sky than water to me, the camas lily appreciates lower, wetter ground, which means that sometimes it lives in the silt of relict channels and silted in streams. Camasland is a flat meadow within a bowl of forested hills, and the stream that winds through it has meandered here and there over the years. The photo above shows the faint blue of camas in one of those old channels, with the yellow flowers and larger foliage of balsamroot on the banks. Difference in elevation between these zones is only a few inches, but that's enough to nurture quite different vegetation on each. The meandering blue is an echo of a stream, a channel living forever.

This landscape is special to modern people as well. Years ago, the state decided to conserve the ecosystem here, and set aside most of it. There are rare species involved, but the place is special also because of the abundance and cultural importance of some of the more common species present. Preserving this place forever means that the ancient yet fleeting beauty of a wildflower meadow will not become a housing subdivision (the fate of most prairies west of the mountains) or some other modern development that will be fleeting compared to the natural and cultural history of Camasland, but which could do irreversible damage.

Pollen Ate 'er

Lip-ticklin' the nectivory

One of the pleasures of my work is to be high up in the Cascades, in a little meadow, baby I don't wanna come down. This episode of MT comes to you from yon mt. Back in the golden days of summer (right at the beginning, before it gets all parched).

The flying insects queue upon a faint aroma, or a UV signal, or maybe even some color so obvious that even us humans can sense it, and dive into a flower. There they stick in mouth-parts, suck to heart's content, and move on to find some other content (they are never full til the sun sets, in near opposition to us humans). Accidentally (they would say), they transport pollen, the DNA transfer proof of their slavery to the supposedly more primitive plants they serve. 

Suckin da bugga dry

Other times, the insects just settle in. From the Bible to the Exorcist, canonical wisdom tells us of the locust swarms arriving and marauding til nothing is left for us bipedal apes. More often, the leeching suckage bypasses us, especially in our modern dependance on the few crops agribidness allows us to eat. As in the aphid dairy pictured above, tended by ants on a lupine. They will not stop sucking vital bodily fluids (salutations, doc strangelove) until the weather turns or the host is dead. 

Is the pollinator a hero, and the parasite a villain? Evolution thinks they're both heroes. Perpetuation and selection both have their place. High up in the Cascades, nature turns on and tunes in, but will never drop out or give up.

 

Grass

Some while ago, I took to upon myself to turn a sunny westerly slope into Eastern Washington. Sure, Olympia lacks basalt and the interior's ferocious sun, but drainage was good and due to some oversight there was no second-growth doug-fir blocking the sun. In came a few plugs of prairie and some shrubbe-steppe-seeds. Sages tridentata and ludovica with whatever rhizomes and bulb hitchhiked in the root-balls. Camas (nevermind the single common name, this includes multiple species).


But one thing I've learned, is that if you aim to reproduce a meadow, a wild-esque prairie, you need to have a major grass component. 


OK. I learned that from reading books. Which--in order to be produced in sufficient quantity to reach an occasional book-buyer like myself--must be produced in mass quantities, and therefore subject to dumb-down market demands or a dedicated/devoted publishing house. Sometimes, I would like to think, I find a rare treasure of ethnobotany or farm-team Esoterica agronomus through sheer determination, but these cases are random, and I'm not religious enough to attach any particular significance to such revelations. 


Whatever doubt I may have about "the literature," there's no particular reason doubt the importance of grass in meadows, and so I've only weeded out the cheatgrass and that rhizomatous, centapedoid crap is that creeps in from the relict (and, were I to ignore it, revengeful) lawn. I've even gathered seed from certain grasses that look cool. One day, I'll get around to ID-ing the species in the photos above, but for now it is enough to know that I got some pretty Plateau grasses growing in Olympia (without too much ecologuilt, since species from over there will succumb to dark-damp cold before they can get to be too much of a problem on this side of the mountain, in an area already heavily disturbed).


If you waded through those ramblings, my apologies. Really, I just posted because I'd spent time tweaking those photos, and didn't want the time to goto waste.

Spring!

Happy Spring, yall. The photo is of wildflower in mid-Columbia country.

Days of sunshine led up to the Vernal Equinox, and now a nice Sunday morning shower quenches the advancing plants on the first full day o' Spring. Best of all, someone is giving away wild phlox. So I'm outta here.

Weedboy

To be a weed: an ambition most rare. A bad joke to most, but a guiding principal to me. I want to grow like a weed, to survive and thrive beyond my native range.


For what is a weed but a success in the wrong place? Globalization, climate change, even good old fashioned cross-pollination, what are these all if not foreminders that the finicky curators of the world will never win? Most of the “pristine” environments of the world are illusions—the Amazon rainforest was once an Indian garden, the Virginia woodlands of 1606 an oft-burnt game park—and all of them will change and morph as new arrivals come. Some of the new arrivals wreak havoc when freed from the strictures of their homes—the frowning disapproval of elders, the clampdown of the predator’s jaw—some species are like those drunken sailors on liberty, running roughshod over locals and dispersing their seed wherever they can. Even in this, though, even in their sneaking or invading, there can be value, as like a virus they test the strength of their hosts, the strongest of which gain immunity, bear stronger offspring, and adjust or outlast the exotic pathogen.


But I am no apologist for the weeds that wipe out the native species, and don’t aspire to that. I seek humbler weedhood: the kind that takes hold in harsh un-vegetated lava flows and sidewalks, that crawled out of a swamp but can make do in a desert, that can be whacked all summer and sprout anew in the spring. Stubborn, ineradicable, persistent, stoic, broken but not bowed: possessed of a continuum of obstinacies despicable and fidelities admirable.


Weeds grow paradoxes. I am the ugly flower nobody suspects of wafting sweet airs, a mysterious and unexpected gift, rewarding most fully only the curious who will take the time to put their nose to the dirt. I am the koa haole, scrawny invader tree whose spindly shade nurses young endemics, whose taproots break eroded hardpan and start soil growing again, feeding it with nitrogen fixing nodules, whose succession eventually runs its course and moves elsewhere.


I am the medicine hidden in the cells, known best to the uneducated peasants.


I am the dandelion in the lawn, relentlessly poisoned or pried up by most, but still offering gifts to any and all who can see them. Yellow cheer to the sad. Fluffy toys to the ticklish and the kids whose breath still blows happy winds. Healthy greens and roots to the hungry. Wine to the parched. Life’s renewed foothold in the paved and smothered land.


Weeds wander, and make homes wherever they can. Quick to recognize the hospitality of the plowman. Wont to spread their seed far and wide. Ready to try new fields. Happy to occupy the fringes and exhausted places spurned by affected cultivars. Able to pull up roots and move in when it is time, or to put them down as opportunities arise. Likely to improvise with roots from stems, sprouts from half-eaten bits and old damaged seed. Always a thumb out to hitch a ride in a boot, a feather, a gust.


Unafraid to land and try growing in someplace new and unexpected. Weeds pioneer where others would hesitate, and are seldom heard to complain when the place they improved gets gentrified, pushing them out again (although they do tend to sneak back in the second you turn your back).