Category — Wild plants

This is the time of year when juniper berries are thick on the stem. These are the berries that gave gin its name (ginèvre is French for juniper) – and its peculiar flavor. So next time you hoist a classic gin cocktail, think of its origins, and salute the juniper.

Junipers can be diminuitive bushes no higher than your ankle or shin, like our native Juniperus communis montana which (as the name implies) can be found in the mountains. Las Pilitas points out that this is a very adaptable plant: rock outcroppings are its native habitat, but it also thrives given garden soil, water, and plenty of sun.

As you can see, rock outcroppings are the natural habitat of larger junipers, too. Our native Juniperus californica sets its roots right in rock, and is probably partly responsible for helping to break up some of this high Sierra granite (this tree was growing at about 6,000 feet). (For more about how trees help create soil, check this post.)

California junipers can be shrubs or trees, depending on where they grow.  Severe mountain winds and climates make them into Moore-like sculptures.

 The “fur” on their bark isn’t particularly soft; it’s more like bark having a fibrous bad-hair day. But it does make intriguing patterns and textures. For the California Indians the fiber was more than an aesthetic experience: it was valuable for diapers, clothing, and mattresses.

Probably because of the pungent essential oils in its wood, both kinds of native juniper have been prized for fenceposts. “A juniper post will outlast two post holes.”

The oils in juniper were valuable to California Indians in different ways. They were used as smudges and teas for coughs, colds, flus and fever, and they were probably effective, because juniper oil is antiseptic, cleans the digestives system, and promotes detoxification generally. High blood pressure, constipation, and hiccups were also treated with juniper (juniper oil increases circulation).

French hospitals, which use much more aromatherapy than ours, used a rosemary/juniper smudge as a disinfectant until fairly recently. (They would have used the European junipers near them, but different kinds of juniper have similar uses.)

In Native American saunas, berries were thrown on hot rocks, probably giving the same disinfectant effects, as well as feelings of health, love, and peace, which are associated with juniper. I have yet to try this, but it sounds as if it might be as intoxicating as gin, without the bad aftereffects. (I’ve always found that gin is a sneaky, somewhat crazy high, coming up behind me softly with a very big mallet.)

The berries were also used for cold medicine and stopgap food when supplies ran short in winter. If you’ve ever tasted juniper berries, you’ll know they’re very pungent and strong-tasting, a lot like biting into a succulent pine needle. They taste very medicinal, but they’d be a tough thing to make into a meal. Their medicinal qualities might have helped stave off illness in times of weakness, though.

I was surprised to find that juniper berries can be found in our own food. Besides flavoring your gin, juniper berries may be in your prepared meats, fish, and sauerkraut (this really makes me want to read my sauerkraut labels more often).

But amazing and versatile and beautiful as their berries are, there’s something about junipers I like even better. Like redwoods, junipers can keep going even when they’re mostly dead; trees that do this are often associated with death and resurrection in myths and stories. It’s a beautiful thing to see the clean, almost bonelike dead wood striped with living, furry bark. A reminder to us all that it takes only a little spark of life to keep on.

   Sources:   Las Pilitas- great California native site with lots of information on plant habitats, uses, propagation, and more

.Mojave Desert  http://mojavedesert.net/plants/shrubs/juniper.html – Desert-oriented native plant site

arboretum.ucsc.edu/pdfs/ethnobotany_webversion.pdf -  an excellent .pdf on California native plant uses, from the University of Southern California arboretum

Essential Oils Desk Reference, Third Edition, Essential Science Publishing

In my area, columbines are a late spring/early summer flower. But in the high mountains – especially with the late, cold spring we had – they’re blooming about now.

It’s hard not to love the gracefulness of columbines. They’re elegant en masse, as the picture at the top shows, dangling from arched stems, with their pretty almost clover-like foliage hidden by other groundcovers. And I love their individual shapes, which you can see even in the bud.

Columbines are another instance where I find the wild flower much more graceful than many of the garden types. Though I enjoy the larger, bolder McKana hybrids, and some of the others, I find many of the garden varieties distressing.

The trend to make every columbine double, for instance, like a bad re-enactment of a Victorian bonnet, stuffed with frill upon rolled frill until the shape is just a mass of writhing loops.

Or, even worse, the spurless kind – what, pray tell, is the point of a columbine without the graceful spurs?

That’s certainly what some bees must think, because sometimes they bite through the bulb at the tip of the spurs, to steal the nectar. Otherwise, columbines have to be pollinated by very large bumble bees or hummingbirds – nothing else can reach down there. So it is clear their blooming schedule has evolved to accommodate hummingbird migration. How did that happen? It’s only one of the mysteries of life.

I found this red-and-yellow columbine in a boggy spot, a little pocket with corn lilies, sedges, and other moisture-loving plants. The soil was a moosh of crushed granite and silt, and it had an eastern exposure. As you can see, they were thriving there, so if you want to plant them, you can take tips for the garden.

I’ve also seen these columbines in drier places – the wild western columbine is supposed to be a little more drought-tolerant than its twinlike eastern cousin,  Aquilegia canadensis. But I’ve noticed that, when Aquilegia formosa grows in drier areas, it takes advantage of seasonal wetness, then dies back until another year.

We have other wild columbines in California, such as the very-long-spurred, fragrant Aquilegia chrysantha, long on my List of Desired Plants. If you’re wondering why it’s not already in my garden, well, that’s because my List of Desired Plants has hundreds of names on it, and would require winning the lottery to fulfill.

The Latin name “aquilegia” means “eagle”, referring to the shape of the flower (you can especially see it in the forming bud). The namers of this flower appear to agree with me that their spurs are their most distinctive and telling point. (So to speak.) And the species name, I think, makes an even better case for preserving the spurs: “formosa” means “beautiful”.

If you have a boggy spot (or even a container with no holes), you might want to invite some beautiful eagles  into your garden. Or just admire them in their native habitat.

I love the rhythm of tall grasses, bending in the meadow.

Gardeners could take a lot of tips from the way nature has arranged this meadow.  There’s not a clunky note in there, unless you count the power lines.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I can’t identify this flower, which I spent so much time photographing. So I’m going to quickly move to emphasizing what a beautiful job this natural planting does, of providing interest close up

at a short distance

and in the broad sweep.

Pink and pink-purple colors are repeated in this late-summer landscape. Perennial sweet pea*, Lathyrus latifolius,  glows against the green and gold of the grasses. It grows in my area, too. But here in the higher altitudes, it takes on a delicate character absent where I live. It probably dies back in the snow, and doesn’t have the chance to become the tangle of lianas that wild sweet peas become in the foothills. (I once saw a puppy play tug-of-war with the lathyrus in our area: the lathyrus won.**)

The same situation applies to this Sierra thistle, Cirsium californicum, which provides a nice feeding place for bees but doesn’t seem to be taking over the meadow, the way thistles in my own area would.

These fetching little vetches, lower than my ankle,  are making a tiny landscape of their own, interwtined with the grasses. At least I think they’re vetches; I haven’t been able to properly identify them.  (It might be meadow hosackia, Lotus torreyi,  but the typical coloring of meadow hosackia is lighter.) In this plant, the typical pea-family flowers start yellow, then deepen into  tinges of red as they age.

Wetland meadows are probably not the first thing you think about when you hear “high Sierras”. And there’s a reason for that: most of the Sierras are seasonally dry; the vegetation runs from chapparal to sagebrush to red fir communities – and when you get to the timberline, the vegetation runs to rock and very small plants.

Most of the Sierra wetlands I’ve seen have been little pockets, tucked in among the dry clay and granite landscapes that are our usual summer fair. I’ve seen little fens on the side of a long, dusty road;  tiny oases by the side of a lake; and this more unusual wetland meadow, where, as you can see, dry sagebrushy land is not far off.

There’s an important lesson in this for gardeners as well as naturalists: take advantage of your microclimates and – I just made this up – microtopography. Gardeners can get ideas from landscapes like these. If you have a wet spot in your garden, what about making your own little pocket meadow, using wild plants from your own area?

*  Perennial sweet peas (or at least L. latifolia) aren’t actually sweet; they don’t have fragrance.

**Granted, it was a very small puppy. But still.

Last June, all my blog entries were about water-saving gardening. I’m going to carry on the tradition (if repeating something once can be called a tradition) and dedicate my June posts this year to garden practices that save water. To me, one of the most obvious ways of saving water is using plants who already know how to survive on the free water you’re already getting – your own beautiful natives.

 I have a special fondness for this common wildflower, which I’ve know for many years. It’s the kind of feeling that prompted the Pilgrims to slip in a few flowers amongst their strictly utilitarian vegetable and herb seeds. They carried the comfort of their common dooryard and meadow flowers to this unknown land, flowers like heartsease (Viola tricolor) and dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis). These weren’t the big glamorous garden flowers of today; they were homely ambassadors of modest beauty: the field and hedge flowers of their native landscapes. These personal loves spoke through even all that Puritan guilt and utilitarian duty.

That’s the way I feel about buttercups: they’re not conspicuous, or glamorous, or productive in any obvious way, but I love them. And, I have to say, I purely detest the large swollen ranunculus relatives in the bulb catalogues, swamped in their multiple folds.

For the first time in many years (I spend less time than I should lying in fields of buttercups these days) I took a close look at buttercups, just to see what I could see. And one thing I discovered made me realize how they might have been persuaded to become the bloated patriarchs of the catalogues. For one thing, color. Wild ranunculus often sports a gleaming white petal or two, which hints that it might be amenable to changing its color, if bred for it.

The second thing is petals. The buttercups in my neighborhood (Ranunculus occidentalis) usually have five sepals, and mostly have five petals – but there are a lot of exceptions.

It doesn’t take much looking to find a buttercup with more petals than five. There’s the occasional six-petal flower. There are the ones that splay out multiple petals (the highest count I got when I went out photographing was nine, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others with more). And there are the ones that stack them up in two layers, which looks to me like a prototype (if you have an evil-genius mind) to those big fold-on-fold-on-fold ranunculus in the catalogues.

When it comes to a discussion of buttercups, there’s an important issue that can’t be avoided: do you like butter? I have no idea where the custom of holding buttercups under people’s chins, to see the yellow reflection, came from. It’s one of those bits of myth that gets passed from child to child (for how long? “Ring around the rosy” comes from the Black Plague), but is seldom noticed by adults.

Maybe it’s an old health question: in winter, people didn’t get much in the way of fats, once the cows or goats went dry and the fall butchering was eaten. Maybe it was a way of checking to see if a person’s skin had enough oil to be healthy. I realize this is far-fetched, and I invite you to add your own theories, far-fetched or close at hand.

Of course I have to admit, I didn’t learn my butter-liking techniques from Ranunculus occidentalis (occidentalis means “west” in Latin). Though I am a native California, my parents transplanted me to New Jersey at a tender age. So the buttercup I learned to put under people’s chins, sometime early in elementary school, was Ranunculus abortivus L., the littleleaf buttercup native to New Jesey.

There is more than one kind of native buttercup, even in California. The white water buttercup (Ranunculus aquatilis) grows in ponds or small streams, as the name implies. Ranunculus californicus has some of the same range as R. occidentalis, but R. californicus has  9 to 16 petals as a standard, not a variation, and grows in moist places.

Whatever their type, wild buttercups can be replanted for years of pleasure. The easiest way to seed them, of course, is to leave them uncut until the seedpods mature and they seed themselves. You can also gather ripe seed from elsewhere, and scatter it nearby, acting as a part of nature (which is, after all, what we properly are).  Of course you’ll want to be sure you’re harvesting only a small portion of seed from a good stand – you want the wild plants to flourish in their own chosen spot, as well as near you.

Where to plant them when you get the seeds home? My buttercups prefer moist water-meadows, but they will grow – for a briefer time – on the winter-rain-soaked dry upland meadows.

At least that’s true for Ranunculus occidentalis. Prairie buttercups (Ranunculus rhomboideus) like dry, well-drained soil.  Other US species don’t seem to care if it’s moist or dry.

And that’s not the end of the likes and dislikes of various kinds of buttercups. In my search for buttercup identity, I came up with scads (a specialized botanical term) of species from all over the world; they seem to especially love very far north Eurasian lands like Finland and Russia. It’s likely that, if you live in a temperate region, there’s a wild buttercup near you, just suited to your climate and rainfall.

So it seems I’ve started this post trying to tell of  a personal love, and wound up in global mystery. Love is like that. What are the homely plants that play a large part in your own inner landscape?

If you’re interested in more on natives, I’ve written up a lot of my own Northern California ones  (just select the Wild Plants). Or try Lost in the Landscape for witty, informative, and beautifully-photographed posts on Southern California natives. For California natives in general, Las Pilitas will fill you in on a plethora of varieties, uses, and habitats – plus they sell the plants in question. And there’s always the California Native Plant Society.

Those of you in Texas might enjoy Conscious Gardening, which has a lot on natives and other ways to save water in the garden. If any readers have suggestions for other reliable native plant sites outside of California, I’d really like to know. Some of the New Jersey wildlings of my youth are also dear to me, and I’d love to know to get a refresher on what their natural environments are.

(the continued search for the identity of a small, inocuous weed)

Having failed to find my mystery weed at the California site, I went to another weed site, from the University of Illinois. This one works by the process of elimination, even more like using an automated key: in the window on the right is a long list of herbs. In the left window is a series of questions to answer. As you gradually check boxes on the left (leaf type, leaf shape, leaf edge, and so on),  the list on the right shrinks, eliminating the weed names your choice has ruled out. When you have it down to just a few weeds, you can click on them and go see their pictures and a little writeup.

I decided my little white-flowered shepherd’s-purse-like thing was NOT Virginia pepperweed; the edges of the leaves of my plant definitely have no teeth, the way pepperweed does.

Virginia Tech’s weed id site  simply has an alphabetical index, not too helpful if you have no idea what you’re looking for. They do have .pdfs on common weeds and how to deal with them, though.

But I really wanted to get a name for my weed.  I decided to go for the big guns.  The Weed Science Society of America (who knew?)  has pages on Science Policy, jobs related to weeds,  funding and grants, and other areas of weedy interest. They’ve  got a bookstore and a press room.  You can even follow their press releases on Twitter!

Unfortunately, they also use the list method, so you need to have some idea what you’re looking for before you can see a picture or specs. Sometimes this would work for me, but not for this weed .  They do have weed i.d. links, though: one to a DVD you can buy, another to some of their own weed i.d. materials for sale, and the third to the USDA plant database,  one of the most thorough in the nation. Unfortunately, while the USDA plant database will give you a special page on the plants in your state, it uses the list method, so it was a bust on this occasion.

I flicked back to the Weed Science Society page. There was a menu item that had piqued my interest, “The Intriguing World of Weeds”,  where you can find long, multifaceted articles about common weeds, written by Larry Mitich, who was the first weed extension specialist at North Dakota State U.  I intend to come back here, because these are really good articles. And I’ve read a lot of stuff on plants, so I’m not just talking through my hat.

Still, I had to find a name for my plant. I went to another famous ag school, to see what I could see. Rutgers, in New Jersey, gives you a weed gallery, sorted by scientific name, common name, or thumbnail images, so even not knowing the name, I could search there:

My plant does look a good deal like the bittercress there (Cardamine spp.), but the leaves of the bittercress are too big and the wrong shape – and there’s no basal rosette.  The photographs on this site are of noticeably better quality than on other university sites, where overexposure or unclear portraits are common. The ones I checked were by Dr. John Meade, weed scientist emeritus. He does good plant i.d. photos.

The Northeastern Weed Science Society  is a bonanza of weed identification links: the aquatic weed section sends you to about six sites; the terrestrial weed section has about twenty. What makes this much better than Google is that all these sites have been weeded out, so to speak: you know you’re going to good resources, maintained by people who know their stuff.

The weed i.d. sites I’ve already mentioned are on it, plus many more. I went to the one at Penn State,  since that was one I hadn’t tried, but it became clear that their ideas about weed resources were more geared to science: management and ecology of weeds, studies on herbicides. The ecology of weeds (an entire separate site) would interest me at other times, but I kept moving, in hopes of finding my weed.

I went to the U Mass website, but they use the list format. They do add plant families to the list, so that makes it more possible to find a plant that you kind of sort of have an idea about. Still, there are no pictures available until you click a name, which makes for tedious searching.

I couldn’t resist checking out Purdue’s “Common Weeds of No-Till Cropping Systems”, but the page was decommissioned, with a link to their regular Weed Science page. They do have an excellent series of slide shows, sorted by category. I picked  ”Simple Perennials”; I didn’t know whether my weed was annual or perennial but it sure has staying power.

I liked that the slides are manually operated, so you don’t have to go “Oh wait, was that it?” as the picture whizzes by. And the slides are good. Text above slides describes what you’re looking at: “Dandelion, mature plant.” “Dandelion taproot.”  I was amused to find multiflora rose as a weed.  The “Annual Broadleaves” slide show was more of a problem; the perennial list, coming in at 33 slides, wasn’t a bad browse, but I wasn’t ready to go through 99 slides of annuals. Still, there is a ton of information to be had on this site. Botanical slide sets, for instance, are listed by family, and there are trustworthy links to other sites.

So how did I finally identify my weed? The old-fashioned way. I went over and asked my gardener/botany fiend neighbor, who’d also done it the old-fashioned way. “It’s some kind of cress,” he said. “I’ve tried to key it out, but I can’t identify the species.”

That was supposed to be the end of the post. But Brent identified this weed as a native bittercress (Cardamine oligosperma) in the last post, providing the species that my neighbor hadn’t yet worked out.  The Latin species name means “few seeds”, which seems odd for a plant my neighbor says spreads itself plentifully (but it’s not hard to remove). If you google “Cardamine oligosperma image” you’ll get some good photos along with some lousy ones (one of the lousy ones, unfortunately, is from the USDA website).

The Calflora site describes the types of areas where Cardamine oligosperma is found, and that’s a fit, too. For those of you who live in California, and have a good guess on the name of the plant in question, this site has a county-by-county map that helps confirm where a particular plant grows.

These last sites have me convinced that Brent has the right i.d.; I’ll see if my neighbor agrees.

So I’ve gotten this weed identified using sort of a combination of the old (ask someone local who gardens or naturalizes a lot) and the new (search online). Check out Brent’s blog  “Breathing Treatment”  for more about native California plants, weather, and gardens.