Category — Foliage

I felt little hard things hitting me on a mountain walk with a friend one year. I turned around, and he was laughing; he’d been throwing acorns at me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that those plants were oaks. Waist-high bushes? Leaves that looked, not like lobed deciduous oak trees, or even like the different forms of live-oak leaves, but, well, like huckleberries. I’d just never noticed the acorns. I mean, does this look like an oak to you?

I think part of my problem was that shrubby bushy things just didn’t get my attention the way flashier plants do. It’s only fairly recently that I’ve come to appreciate foliage en masse–leaves that aren’t unusual close up,  like grapes or gooseberries, but make a great effect massed together. It’s probably something psychological, as if I was looking for the individual, but wasn’t interested in the community. Something like that.

It’s also just that I never imagined there could be an oak that comes only to my waist.  It’s the same high-mountain variation as the manzanitas, only in this case the leaves are entirely different from any other oak. But since I’ve read up on this, I’ve found there is another oak in the desert southwest which is called “shin oak” (Quercus mobriana) because it grows in thickets that are about knee-high. I’d imagine that this oak has adapted to severe desert conditions in the same way huckleberry oak has learned to grow in high altitudes.

Like the other high-mountain plants, huckleberry oak has a short time to make its growth and produce fruit. The catkins come out in May or June, when there is often still snow on the ground (in a heavy winter, quite a lot of it).  I took photos of these acorns in early to mid-September, and as you can see, a lot of them are still quite green. They had about six weeks to two months before the first serious snowfall. (I have seen snow sticking in September at this altitude, but it doesn’t really settle in until later.)

Many of these oaks just had empty acorn caps, and I’m guessing the critters harvested the ripe ones right away. While Native Americans used acorns as a staple food, I’m wondering if they would have left these thumbnail- to fingernail-sized acorns for the chipmunks, squirrels, and other rodents? I’m not sure about this, since there are grinding holes in the high altitudes.

Grinding holes are deep round bowls in the rocks, a sort of natural mortar made by using smaller rocks as pestles. In my area, they are called acorn holes: the assumption is that they were used for grinding acorn meal, a large staple. But maybe that wasn’t their only use.  Manzanita berries are also a huge crop in my area, and the tribes here ground them to make different kinds of food. Would the high-mountain grinding holes have been used for the high mountain manzanita berries (some of which mature earlier), but not oaks?

That might be the case, because the indigenous people moved down the hill in the colder weather, which would have coincided with acorn harvest at lower altitudes. Further down the hill, acorns come off large trees, plentiful, much bigger,  and easier to harvest. But I don’t really know.

I was interested to find that some of these bizarre miniature (as I think of them) huckleberry oaks have wasp galls, just like their larger cousins down the hill. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a decent shot of the oak galls. This kind looks like a strange swelling on the branches, about the size of a jawbreaker (or a large hazelnut): round, cream-colored, and hard, with a textured pattern weirdly like an acorn cap.

The galls are made by a type of gall wasp, Cynips maculipennis. They burrow into the branches and lay their eggs. I’m not sure exactly how the gall forms, but the larvae live in it until they are ready to hatch. According to my natural history books, they sometimes lay eggs on other plants, but I have only seen their galls on oaks.

My gardening lesson? To look more carefully at the plants around me. I might actually recognize them. And maybe the lesson huckleberry oak has for all gardeners is: look for different forms of plants. They may work in your garden better. Or they may just be interesting to know about. All gardeners like to contemplate the infinite variety of the plant world. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be gardeners.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History,  University of California Press, 1963 (There is a newer version out, but this is the one I still own and use.)

Elmer L. Little, The Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Western Region,  Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

I’m always intrigued at the way different locations mutate plants into different shapes.

I, of course, am pleased to call them mutations, because I’m used to their other forms. So to me, the different forms are unusual. Intriguing. It’s like looking at a friend who just got plastic surgery or peacock blue hair.

In the high mountains (between 6,000 and 10,000 feet), many of these variations seem to make a plant lower to the ground, smaller.

Where there is snow eight or nine months out of the year, low to the ground is a smart choice for a spreading plant. If it doesn’t stay low, six or seven or up to twenty feet of snow load will put it there.  Smaller size may also have something to do with short growing season and soil fertility. Rock is close to the surface in high mountains.

Where I live, manzanitas are tall, shrubby plants-the mature ones are well over my head–with twisty mahogany-colored branches. When the moon or headlights shine on them, their pale green leaves turn white.

I delight in this little pinemat manzanita (Arctostaphylos nevadensis), which is a miniature version of the type that grows where I live.  In the mountains, it’s still a shrub, but it comes only to my ankles. To me, this shrubby groundcover looks like gorgeous landscaping. But it also serves some practical purposes.

Manzanitas are great soil-preservers, because they can grow and hold soil on slopes and in soils with very little nourishment. In my area, they cover sunny, dense clay hillsides.  In the high mountains, they thrive on a diet of granite and crushed granite, where very few plants can survive.

Pinemat manzanita berries are somewhat smaller than the tall manzanitas that grow in my area, but they are large in proportion to Arctostaphylos nevadensis’s tiny height. There weren’t too many berries evident this year, but they may have already disappeared down the gullets of the grouse, chipmunks, and squirrels and other wildlife who would find these berries at a handy height for eating.

But manzanita has even more to it than beauty and bounty. Manzanita is in the same family as heaths, heathers, and madrone. It’s also related to uva-ursi (bearberry or kinnickinnick), which is easy to see when you look at this creeping variety.

It’s so closely related to uva-ursi that it has almost the same chemical profile in its leaves. Both have arbutin, a natural antibiotic and diuretic. It can kill and wash away bacteria from the urinary tract. Uva-ursi is traditionally used for bladder and kidney problems, so you could use manzanita in the same way.

You’d need to be careful about the dose, though. Many people make the mistake of vaguely believing that plant drugs are safe because they’re “natural”. Digitalis and scopolamine are also natural, but how you take them means the difference between improving your life and meeting your death. It’s important to be respectful of plants and know what you’re doing.

If you take them in very large quantities, uva-ursi and manzanita can both cause collapse and death. The proper dosage is one teaspoon of leaves steeped in sixteen ounces of water, taken two or three times a day. This tea has a not-unpleasant astringent taste, a bit like the tannin in black tea (actually, manzanita has tannins in it, also). Don’t drink it if you’re pregnant, though; in some women, it can cause uterine contractions.

Historically, the Shoshone drank this tea as a remedy for venereal disease (one of the gifts of Europe to the Americas). If you look at the chemical constituency, it seems like a good thing to try. Chances are it was a lot more effective than whatever European remedy was being offered at the time (mercury, a toxin, was used on its own earlier on; it’s still included in many drugs).

Arbutin has been synthesized as a drug. You may be surprised to learn that taking manzanita or uva ursi tea is actually more effective than taking the drug. Arbutin breaks down so quickly in the body that it often destablilizes before doing its work. Uva ursi has substances in its leaves which preserve the arbutin on its travels through your body. It also has other ingredients which may work synergistically with the others, including quercetin, which is good for your respiratory system, and allantoin, the famous nerve- and tissue-healing ingredient in comfrey.

Over the years, I’ve learned over and over about herbs whose effects were better than their so-called active ingredient. We have a lot to learn about plant chemistry. When drugs are isolated from plants, they often cause side effects that are not present when the whole plant is taken. Or, like manzanita and uva-ursi, the constituents of the plant work as a team to make its action more effective.

Coincidence? I think not.

Next post: more uses for yet another kind of manzanita.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

If anybody knows what this plant is named, let me know.  It’s one of my favorite high-mountain plants.

I don’t even know if it’s a shrub or a perennial. It has the hard green stems that say they might turn woody with time, although they don’t. It comes only to my ankles, but so does pinemat manzanita, and that’s a shrub.

I looked assiduously through two books, with many false alarms when I thought I’d identified it. Then I’d look at the actual plant. Nope.

Despite not knowing its name, this plant has taught me a lot about gardening. For starters, it gave me a beautiful example of minimalist groundcover.

It can also grow in amongst other plants, where it seems to stretch out a little, in order to get its share of sun.

And it’s also taught me this lesson: a plant doesn’t have to be glamorous or big or unusual to be a beautiful presence. I’ve never seen this plant flowering (maybe if I had, I would have been able to identify it), so I don’t know if it has gorgeous blossoms.  It doesn’t have exciting bark or unusual foliage; it’s not large or full. All I have seen is its leaves going from the brightish green of summer to the blazing yellow of fall. Morning sun lighting it up by the rocks makes it one of the most soul-satisfying sights of my mountain day-and a mountain day has many contenders for soul-satisfying sights.

Names come after the knowing of a plant, not before. I know this plant a little, and looking for its name has gotten me better acquainted. I looked at it more carefully, examined its structure and form, and thought about it in relation to other plants.

Since many things in life are a mystery, I’m not unhappy with the way things are, between me and this plant. Not all mysteries are meant to be solved.

Bearded iris foliage with a heart-shaped leaf of Dioscorea batatas vine.

According to feng shui, spiky foliage denotes activity, energy, and excitement in the garden. It’s associated with the yang principle, which is the outgoing, upthrusting, active aspect of life. Everything shiny, bright, light, or pointed represents the yang principle.

The yin principle, which is relaxing, inviting, and nurturing, is represented by soft or dull or dark foliage, broad or rounded leaves, and broad or rounded plants.

While I wouldn’t want to have all spiky foliage in my garden (and any feng shui practitioner would caution against it), some of my recent and ongoing plant choices have led to more spiky foliage in my garden. And I’m enjoying it.

The iris in the header photo is one of the legacies of a trip to a local grower. I’m not wild about bearded iris (I hope I don’t get a lot of flak for this), but the types I saw there opened my eyes to the possibilities of iris, and I ordered many more than I had planned to get.

Well, when have I ever gone to a place purveying plants, and failed to order more than I’d planned to get?

So I stuck them where there was space in various containers, and I’m afraid I didn’t label them too carefully, so I can’t tell you which this one is until it flowers. While I was watering, I noticed how sweetly the fan of iris leaves fell, and how nicely they were outlined by the light. They are accompanied in this picture by the heart-shaped leaf of a yam vine (Dioscorea batatas).

This year I experimented with japonica corn, an ornamental variety. In feng shui, these leaves would be considered a bit less yang than the iris leaves: they’re a bit wavy, and bits of them (although you can’t see them in this picture) curve gracefully down.

My abiding love for lilies includes their foliage. Yang aspects of trumpet lily leaves would be their shininess and spikiness. The round spiral pattern of the leaves on the stem, though, would be considered yin: peaceful, restful, nurturing. This Lilium regale (regale lily; not a hard translation) has long since flowered, but still contributes its good looks to a jumble of plants that includes some sprouting native oaks.

This year I got a lot of glads–flowers I’d often scorned until I tried them, especially some of the older varieties.

What I didn’t expect was that I’d like the foliage. And here’s a perfect example of that interplay of yin and yang that is recommended in feng shui: round, small rose leaves (with those little slightly-yang toothed edges) shadowing the tall, spiky glad foliage.

Actually, if you’ve been paying attention, all of these pictures are about the interplay of yin and yang. How could they help but be? It’s what makes the world go around.

Here’s one of our native purple bush lupines, taken after rain–back when we still had rain.  Lupines are in the pea family, so they add nitrogen to the soil.  Most of the wild varieties are perennial and take some freezing, as well as positions on crushed-granite hillsides or dried-clay roadsides.  Unlike garden lupines, they can also take heat-though they bloom before it gets really hot, and tend to go almost dormant by late summer. This Lupine albifrons is growing in semi-open woods.

One of my very favorite trees, madrones are beautiful in themselves, and make a gracious background for semishade garden plants. (I like to pick the more woodsy types for growing under them. Lilies, columbine, and digitalis are among the good choices for shelter by madrone.) Their brilliant, shiny-green new growth is almost shocking amongst the older, dark-green glossy leaves. They’re semi-evergreen-that is, they do lose leaves, but they always have some on the tree.

Madrones (Arbutus menziesii) are in the heath family, along with manzanita, bearberry, and the European heaths and heathers. They like a high water table (though they don’t need to actually be watered) and they grow bigger and healthier where there’s plenty of moisture in the air as well. Despite their preferences, they grow beautifully in my dry-summer area.

If this weren’t an essay on foliage, I’d go into the many wonders of madrones–bark, berries, flowers, uses, and all-but it really deserves its own post, so I’ll save that for another time.

Black oaks (Quercus kelloggii )  starting to turn in the fall. We don’t get the dramatic colors of New England or the Midwest, but the turning of oaks from green to gold is a quiet drama that lights up every autumn.

Even the final show of foliage–dead and on the ground–has its own beauty.