Category — Wild plants

Every year I get to watch a show.

It only lasts for a week, maybe ten days, so I have to pay attention. And it’s worth paying attention, because when the oaks leaf out, the whole world changes.

The first signs are the swelling buds,  starting to unfurl.

At this point, it’s something you can only see close up. If you’re too busy to look around you, you’ll miss it.

That tiny red tinge expands until it’s noticeable, except to people who are always in a rush. Suddenly, all over the hills, there’s a soft, rusty tinge.

While the rusty leaves are coming out at the bottom of the tree, there is more action up above: some of the leaves that get more sun are already turning an incredible briliant chartreuse, making a beautiful rust-and-green contrast in the trees. I bet you are expecting a spectacular photo right now, but unfortunately I can only say that I try every year – and so far have failed to capture how the light glows through them. I’ll keep trying.

Once the leaves have turned that brilliant, translucent green, I get to see another color show: the contrast of sharp spring green with loud shouting fuchsia blooms of redbud. That’s another show that I haven’t been able to photograph to my satisfaction, and it lasts only a few days. Maybe some things are only meant to be enjoyed live.  I do often wonder, though, why it is that in clothing, say, or room décor, I would loathe the chartreuse-and-fuchsia combo – but in nature, I love it. Maybe it’s something about the light.

Meanwhile, the oaks are going about their business, making the subtle tassel-like flowers that unite the green and rust of the leaves above them.

The leaves are still small enough to let the light through, like a glorious stained-glass window that is constantly overhead.

It’s not long until they become a fluffy opaque green. They’re full size, but they won’t take on their hard, dark green coating for a few weeks. These particular leaves were witness to snow.

In May. (I know I keep saying that, but really: snow in mid-May? For those of you who believe California is a tropical paradise…well, it’s not.)

In fact, this whole show is about a month late this year, like the cranes, the wildflowers, and the temperatures. I’ve heard reports of weird, not to say disastrous, weather in all parts, so I can be grateful that our peculiar weather is just an extension of the cool season. We are lucky.

And I think that I am lucky when I have the chance, each spring, to walk under that original cathedral of shining oak leaves, borne on high, arching branches.

Last week it snowed.

In April.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I live in a state where we have fires in summer, if things aren’t wet enough, and where wells run dry. So I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, we’re about a month behind where we often are this time of year.

The cranes knew it: sandhill cranes fly over at the very beginning of every spring and fall, and they didn’t start until later than usual; I saw the last flight a month ago. The bulbs all knew it; my first daffodils are just fading, when in other years I’d be in the midst of the full spurt of tulips.

And the willows knew it.

Willows are a tree people tend to pass off for most of the year. Oh, there are basket-weavers who keep an eye on their coppices (coppicing is when you prune the willows severely, so that they grow straight and slender, young and smooth and whippy, best for weaving). And there are the famous weeping willows that get celebrated in song and story, most noticeably on blue willowware.

But mostly people pass by the willows; they are often scrubby trees that make disreputable-looking branchy knots with the other creekside, soggy-land shrubs. I’m not even sure of the identity of my own willows (and I’m the kind of person who usually checks). They may be red willows, or one of 14 other species that my usually-reliable Sierra Nevada Natural History lumps together, pictureless and undescribed.

This is the only time of year that most people pay attention to willows, and I know the reason why: their catkins.

You can see several stages of catkin pollination, here

With only soaproot, chickweed, and bittercress doing anything in the garden, it’s wonderful to see any flower.

And there’s something about the furry, quilted texture of willow catkins that’s especially appealing. Maybe the furriness gives us a sense of warmth, subconsciously?

Whatever the appeal, every year I have to go out and cut pussywillows, and bring them in.

In the hothouse of the bottle on my kitchen windowsill, they make little leaves way before they appear on the outside trees.

You can’t see it, but they are making a tangle of roots in the bottom, as well. Willows are notorious for their rooting powers; there are stories (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) of European Americans bringing willow switches from their homes in the east, over the Oregon trail to the west coast, where they stuck them in the ground and sprouted them.

Maybe. I have rooted a willow cutting I left in a bag for a month. (Not a new technique; I just forgot it.)

But I’m going to get the best use out of my willows later on, when I’m taking cuttings. Willow water is famous for helping plants to root; there’s a substance in them called auxin (found in high concentration in tip growth, and used in commercial rooting compounds) which stimulates root growth.

If you want to read more about it, there’s an article by the reliable Fine Gardening here.

Maybe if I had read that article earlier, I would have had more spectacular results. My  laissez-faire attitude: get a five-gallon bucket, put a lot of water in it, cut up a lot of new willow stems (the ones with the smooth skins, not the ones with the rough bark), and let them soak. When I want to water in transplants, I use that water, and I use it on plants that look less than well-established, too. When the water level gets low, I top it up. Sometimes I add more stems. Most of the time, to be honest, the whole thing dries up until next year.

I cut willow stems every year. Because, like willows catkins, they subtly remind us: we have lots more flowers coming. And  fruits to follow.

Despite the snow, hail, and rain so copious it forms little sheets and streams of water in the yard, there’s one native plant that’s coming up, unstoppable. Soaproot.

Soaproot was one of the first plants I got to know, many years ago, when I moved to this area. I was camping out by the river, near what turned out to be a seasonal stream, and there was a good colony of soaproot there.

Soaproot loves to colonize

Later on, I found out that soaproot really likes moist soil, and seems to prefer dirt so wet it’s underwater part of the year. But I’ve also seen it on hilltops near no obvious source of water whatever. It might have been a high-water-table indicator: there were madrone trees all around them (soaproot likes shade), and although madrones will take drought, they love water. The trouble is, I know the well on that property was a very piddly one. Did they just drill in the wrong place? Or are madrones and soaproot less thirsty than I thought? Just another mystery.

...in fact, they love colonizing so much that the storm-damaged leaves crash together sculpturally

Soaproot, as you might have guessed by the name, has a bulbous root that can be used as soap; it lathers when you mix it with water.

Trouble is, that root is about 2 feet down, and the heavy clay soil makes tough digging. Camped out there by the river, I decided to dig up my soaproot in the original style: I used a stick.

That method took me two days and a good share of my patience. You can’t pull the root up; the stem breaks off, as I repeatedly found. So, I kept digging.

I dug only a couple of hours a day. Digging through clay with a stick is a little like serving up sugar with a needle: if you’re diligent, it works, but it’s slow. Probably the Maidu of the area had more patience than I. And maybe better digging skills.

When I did get down to the hairy, bulbous root (the outside has fibrous covering) I found it difficult to deal with. It has many layers, like an onion, only more slippery.

This soaproot is almost at full height; the plants in the pot aren't even up yet

The reason I was digging up soaproot was that I had heard it was a remedy for poison oak, and which I had a case of. (Poison oak is not at all picky about where it grows: shade, sun; wet, dry: it’s all good.) I did manage to get the root to lather, and it did help with the itching, but I’m forced to say that Fels-Naptha laundry soap did a better job, and was less sticky. (This was before I heard about the torture by testing animals get, or at least got, at the Fels-Naptha labs. I stopped buying their soap. It seems to me that there are a lot better and more interesting ways to test soap.)

I did not use the hairy outer covering of the soaproot as a brush, or try roasting and eating the bulb, as Indians who live in soaproot’s range used to do. I’ve eaten a lot of bitter, acrid, and acidic wild foods (at least once), but the idea of roasting one of those slippery, soapy roots is not appealing. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re like onions, and get sweet when you roast them.

Although I am unlikely to dig up any soaproot with a stick this year, I enjoy its cheerful, persistent, burgeoning presence, and look forward to the stems of delicate white flowers– sometimes only a couple of feet tall, sometimes towering to four feet, glinting white in the shade.

In the center of the rosette, the stalk is just beginning

P.S. To any regular readers: this is why my comments and posts have been scarce recently: sometimes I get to do what I want, and sometimes my health has the last word. I’m looking forward to getting back in your gardens as soon as I can.

It might seem an odd time of year to be writing about watercress. It’s a thing we usually associate with summer: cress sandwiches, cress in the salad.

But at a mountain hot springs I found a little warm stream where watercress grows year-round. You can see frost sculptures on the grasses right next to it, but the watercress thrives. You can’t see the snow, because it doesn’t start until you get a bit away from the stream, but it’s there. Frozen hard.

This is one of the things I like about wild plants. They are opportunists. They live, on bare rock,  in shade, in dry and very wet and inhospitable places – and they ask nothing of us. Although when I met up with this cress, I offered my appreciation for this brilliant green in a winter landscape, and I took a few leaves.

There’s something about wild food that’s unlike any other. It may have to do with the way the climates and soil and exposure shape the plant, and give it nutrients you often don’t find in cultivated ones. It may be that when you eat a wild plant, it connects you to the landscape you’re in.

The many Maidu who lived near that hot springs would not have had watercress in their diet, because watercress is a European plant. I have found it growing wild in more than one California stream, though. Probably it was brought here by gold miners looking to avoid scurvy. Or maybe it was brought by the many horticulturalists who followed the gold miners. Whoever brought it, it has settled in happily.

It would have helped with the scurvy many miners suffered from (they ate nothing but beans and whiskey, or close to it), as it’s high in C, as well as vitamin E and beta-carotene. For minerals, you have phosphorus, calcium and iron.

If you want to gather watercress yourself, remember that, while it only grows in flowing water, it will grow in polluted flowing water. So be sure the stream is clean. Juicy plants such as watercress and lettuce are chock-full of whatever pollutants and pesticides are in the ground and water, and I wish commercial lettuce growers would think of this.

Watercress is pretty easy to recognize, especially if you’re a gardener: it’s in the cabbage family, and it has the rounded leaves a lot of brassicas do. In the case of watercress, the leaves are strung on the arms of loose rosettes of the plant, which spread in all directions, lolling in water.

One of the easiest ways to recognize watercress, though is the taste: a peppery greenness that reminds you of its relative, nasturtium.

I’ve never had enough watercress to cook – I just eat a few leaves plain, or pick some to put on bread and butter – it’s classic. But some people like watercress soup, or watercress salad.

People get a little cultlike around watercress. There’s even a site dedicated solely to it. For those of you who have enough watercress to cook, watercress.com (the link will take you to the recipes page) offers suggestions on pasta soup, quiche, baked eggs, and a number of dishes so delicious-sounding that I may have to go and find a bigger patch of watercress…

 I had it all wrong about cottonwoods.

I love the sound of the wind in their leaves,  a sound that mimics flowing water in the way a rainstick echoes rain. I thought they made that sound because they had double-jointed leaves.

It’s one of those things that stuck in my head – wrong, as it turns out. So when I got next to a cottonwood, and started looking at where the petiole meets the branch, and I couldn’t figure out what makes it different. (The petiole is the part that connects the leaf to the stem. In some plants, like willows, it’s very short. In others, such as cottonwoods, it’s extended.) Since I couldn’t make head or tail out of what I was seeing, I went to my old reliable Sierra Nevada Natural History, and looked it up.

I found the clue under aspen (Populus tremuloides). From its species name, tremuloides, it’s easy to guess what trait is being described. From the genus name (Populus), it’s easy to guess that both aspens and cottonwoods are related to poplars, which have the same trembling leaves.  The reason for that, my Sierra Nevada Natural History told me, is that “the leaves, having vertically flat petioles, quiver in any breeze.”

“Vertically flat petioles, vertically flat petioles,” I muttered to myself, unable to configure vertically flat in my mind. So I went out to look.

 Vertically flat petioles look like this:

 And in action, they look like this:

The wide flat edge acts like a miniature sail, so that the least breeze causes leaves to move, and gives them that unique sound.It could be that this allows their seeds – little bits of white fluff that give cottonwood its name – to be scattered farther, increasing their tribe. In any case the sound of the poplar family is unlike any other, a restful sound, as if I were listening to a brook made of air.  Some cottonwoods grow straight up, like their poplar relatives, and others branch out into several trunks. Unlike poplars, however, their crowns are broad and flat.

The bark of the Fremont cottonwood that I was looking at (there are other kinds) is rough and fibrous, a clue to the kind of wood within. A source who knows his firewood told me that it’s next to useless for burning. Since cottonwoods grow only where there’s a high water table, every one of those fibers is filled with water.

So first you have to really dry them out. Then, when you get the into the stove, they burn quickly and dirtily, without much heat, and leave a lot of ash.  If you’re looking for firewood, best look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for a sign – and a sound – of water, cottonwoods will take you there. 

Leaf buds for next year