Category — Wild plants

This is the time of year that cars slow down as they ride the river grade. That’s because this is the time of year that the sticky monkeyflower comes out, glowing peach above your head on the south-facing cliffs as you curve down among them. When the season’s right, they’re accented by purple bush lupines.

Sticky monkeyflower can, and does, grow out of perpendicular granite cliffs. There’s generally a bit of crushed granite in the cliffs as well, and either the monkeyflowers root there or their roots help create the crushed granite that eventually (long after my lifetime) will turn into precious soil.

The name mimulus comes from the original Latin meaning of minus, comic actor (probably the same origin as “mime”; does anybody know?). “Monkeyflower” also refers to the facelike characteristics of this flower. To me, it’s no more like a face than, say, a snapdragon (which sticky monkeyflowers resemble), but okay. Whatever.

Sometimes this plant is listed as Diplacus auranticus, a way to distinguish it from its water-loving mimulus relatives. (Diplacus comes from the Greek diploos, meaning “double”.)

The lumpers and splitters are at it again. Many authoritative sources list this plant as Mimulus. But then again, many authoritative sources list it as Diplacus. You decide. The Diplacus branch of the family (for those who prefer splitting) likes dry, rocky slopes. Other monkeyflowers grow in damp places, sometimes even actually standing in water. Whatever its official name, sticky monkeyflower is the only monkeyflower I know of that is woody and grows in dry areas (“bush monkeyflower” is another name for it).

“Auranticus”, the part of the Latin name experts agree on,  means orange-red, possibly because of the color of  the coastal version of this plant. Pictures of coastal sticky monkeyflower look “oranger” to me; they have more yellow, and they’re darker than the paler peach ones we see here in the foothills. On the other hand, there’s certainly some variance in color from bush to bush, and as the flowers age (they fade a bit), so maybe this is one of those shrubs that sports or adapts easily.

Crossbreeding probably enters in, too. Calflora calls this “a highly variable complex of intergrading and hybridizing forms, many of which have received specific and subspecific names, but which the Jepson Manual has grouped together as a single species.” This photo  shows some of those variations. And I have to say, it does make a case for splitting them into subspecies – but splitting how? I’m not going to get into it. I will just continue to describe the plant, and let others carry on the good fight.

 As for the “sticky” part of its name: the bush exudes a resin, most noticeable in hot weather. Oddly, unlike most resins, it isn’t particularly aromatic, at least not to my nose. The flowers, on the other hand, have their own unique fragrance: they smell like orange bubblegum. Yet another case of art imitating nature.

Next post: sticky monkeyflower in the garden and in beds

The shiny tops of the small buckbrush leaves make it hard to see the telltale sign of ceanothus, but the underside of the leaves shows it clearly: three veins, which come out of their convergence at the stem like three branches of a river.  All ceanothus plants belong to the buckthorn family, or Rhamnaceae.

While I think of ceanothus as a western U.S. phenomenon, my  Directory to Resources on Wildflower Propagation reminds me that this ceanothus is related to a ceanothus called “New Jersey Tea”, a plant used by patriotic (that is, anti-loyalist: politics get confusing) colonists in place of black tea. (Whether their motivation was more political or economic is up to us to guess, though the two seem to entwine a lot.)

Buckbrush trees/shrubs tend to mature into a sort of wheatsheaf shape, as in the photo at the top of this post, with a tight bundle of small trunks culminating in a frothy outfluffing of leaves and, in spring, clusters of bloom (these are said to range from white to blue, but in my area they are just creamy white. Flower color variance is a habit of ceanothus, combined with its tendency to cross-breed). Buckbrush shrubs are one of the ultimates in low-water gardening, since they are adapted to our native climate of winter rain and summer drought.

Las Pilitas Nursery cites one buckbrush that was planted with only one watering, and still survived; most transplanted wild plants take a season of watering to settle in. Buckbrush is also one of the plants used to colonize bare hillsides after a fire. (For more information on buckbrush, including plant companions, do check out the excellent Las Pilitas post.  You can also buy buckbrush plants there.)

Ceanothus, a friend once told me, are the saviors of the foothills: they bring nitrogen into our hard clay-and-granite soils, despoiled by a few rounds of clearcutting plus the hydraulic mining that washed a lot of our local topsoil into the San Francisco Bay. There are so many kinds of ceanothus, even in my own area, that identifying most of them is difficult; they seem to hybridize and sport wildly.

Buckbrush is one of the few kinds of ceanothus that is easily identified. It’s evergreen; the only other evergreen ceanothus I know around here comes about to your shin, so it makes them easy to tell apart, even if they both have stiffy shiny little leaves with fat ends. Buckbrush flowers are different from other ceanothus, too. While most ceanothus have panicles or long (even if tiny) clusters of flowers, buckbrush has clusters flat to the branch.

Buckbrush flowers have a musty, sweet scent that’s different from other ceanothus, and which may account for their name (I haven’t smelled bucks up close in mating season, but I have smelled billygoats: you don’t have to be nearby to get the drift).

Buckbrush also has little spiny protruberances (they’re stiff, but they’re not really sharp, unless you work at it) coming off the branches. I used to think those little pointy things might the reason for the name “buckbrush”. But one of my more general wildflower books (which shall remain anonymous) says that the names “buckbrush” and “deer brush” are generic terms, coming from the way deer browse on these plants.  But in that case, every plant in our area (including the cultivated ones) could be called buckbrush, so it isn’t a very useful explanation.

Anyway,  “buckbrush” in our area means this specific plant, just as “deer brush”, which will be blooming soon, refers to another particular, type of ceanothus, the kind we call “mountain lilac”. Sierra Nevada Natural History gets that right – these are clearly local usages, devised by those of  us who live among the bewildering variety of ceanothus, and need some way of keeping them straight.

Any contributions to the reason for the “buckbrush” name will be gratefully accepted. Just let me know if you’re making them up. No shame in that; common and Latin names are pretty much all made up based on physical evidence. *

*Sylvia take note!

References:

Directory to Resources on Wildflower Propagation, National Council of State Garden Clubs, Inc., prepared by Gene A. Sullivan and Richard H. Daley, Missouri Botanical Garden,  1981

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963  (and later editions)

Manzanita may be common; it may be shrubby; it may even be a fire hazard. But it’s beautifully useful all year long, and throughout its hardy, persistent life. I’ve written here about other, high-mountain manzanitas; everything I wrote there about uses of the leaves and berries applies to our local foothills white-leaf or ghost manzanita, perhaps even more, since our manzanita is a bigger shrub. (While you’re looking, don’t forget to check out Steve’s useful comment on cultivating manzanitas below the “berries” link).
Since it’s native to our clay-and-granite, no-summer-water climate, it’s obvious that manzanita is one tough customer. They’re called “ghost manzanitas” because of one of three water-saving tactics of the foliage: the tough, leathery leaves keep evaporation to a minimum, and their vertical posture, with the thin edge toward the sun, reduces it even more. The light-grey-green color reflects sunlight that would steal moisture by transpiration. (Other manzanitas have brilliant green leaves.) Ghost manzanita leaves caught in the headlights, or by a full moon, shine like silvery phosphorescence.

My first introduction to manzanita was as the firewood that burns even when it’s wet. Since I’d ignorantly been trying to burn wet punky pine and other non-starters to keep warm, this was a revelation. Manzanita not only burns wet, it burns so hot it can warp your stove and make the wall behind it smolder. In a campfire, violet and electric blue streak up in the flames along with the more ordinary yellows and oranges.

Manzanita is colorful even when you don’t burn it. Some get big enough to look very like their sisters, the madrones.The bark is a smooth deep mahogany purple-red, and plum-violet and rosy-rust streaks can be found inside most splits of firewood. (I knew a man who carved them into beautiful spoons.) It’s not always easy to find manzanita big enough to split; it’s a shrubby tree, whose trunks often split up and get no bigger around than my arm at the very very bottom.

This photo also shows another characteristic of manzanitas: living and dead wood cohabit. Manzanitas are what I call death-and-resurrection trees. You can find dead and live wood on the same branch, and you can find many dead branches on a healthy living manzanita. Live branches and saplings are tough, long,  and flexible; I used them to build a wickiup when I first came here, and it seems likely to me that the Maidu might have used them for their own dome-like structures, built partly underground for insulation.

Our large masses of manzanitas  were a major food crop for the local Indians, and they must have been an important one, since the tasty acidic dry berries ripen starting in late spring and stay on the bushes well into the beginning of winter. My friend who’s learning Maidu says that she thinks the name for manzanita is “epuh”; the Maidu word for apple is “eppoli”, and this is a diminuitive. (She’s not absolutely sure about this; I’ll confirm it in a comment on this post when I check with her teacher in a few weeks.) It’s the same in Spanish; “manzanita” means “little apple”. All you have to do is take a look at the fruit to know why.

Manzanita berries are still a major food crop for bears and coyotes, who exhibit the evidence in their scat. If you want to experiment with manzanita berries, and don’t have acres of manzanitas out your back door, Steve (his comment is on the bottom of the page this link takes you to) says that watering them will give you bigger crops of berries.

Since we have huge tangled colonies of manzanita here, it’s hard work to clear out the dead parts; manzanita branches start within a few inches of the ground. You have to crawl on your belly with branches snaring your hair, clothes, and tender body parts to get through manzanita settlements, and sometimes it’s impenetrable no matter which way you turn through the maze.

Eventually, the whole thing dies, and you get brushpiles like this, which are a considerable fire hazard. I once made a privacy fence by crudely interweaving these dead branches; it was a great rustic climbing fence for vines, and easy to take down when it was time to move. Dead manzanita branches are also prime kindling, but since we have so much of manzanita everywhere, they are often bulldozed up and disposed of in burn piles.

While it’s certainly faster, easier, and cheaper to do a wholesale clearing on large acreage, you don’t have to raze manzanita to make it safer for fires. Some prefer to clear by hand, leaving selected trees which are limbed up, so they make sculptural shapes which don’t allow potential fires to jump from crown to blazing crown. It also allows the trees full scope to shape themselves as  specimen plants, unhindered by close-growing others.

It was spring when  I was first introduced to manzanita, the time when the pale-pink flowers dangle from the jade-green leaves like  earrings. Manzanita flowers are our first sign of spring – they bloom in February through April, depending on the year and location – and scent the air with a high, light sweetness on sunny days. Hummingbirds and bees buzz out of the woodwork to sip the blooms, and it isn’t just the birds and the bees doing it. I knew an herbalist, when I first came up here, who showed me how to extract a single drop of nectar from the newly-opened flowers. “Put it in a little vial, and share it with someone you love,” he said. The sweet nectar has an astringent aftertaste, not only a reflection of the tannic acid in the leaves, but possibly a commentary on other kinds of sweetness,  on the need for contrasts.

As a flower essence (a homeopathic remedy that addresses emotional conditions, different from an essential oil), manzanita encourages groundedness and an appreciation of the delights of being in a body. Maybe that herbalist was on to something.

Like the high-mountain manzanitas, ghost manzanita is related to heather, uva-ursi, wintergreen, and madrone, all of which share the same kind of flower. It’s typically called urn-shaped, although I’d say that’s for lack of any better description. Whatever the best name for the shape, it’s designed to keep the sexual parts of the flower protected from wind and weather, and give insects protection while they pollinate.

Manzanita provides food, medicine, construction material, fine carving material, firewood, beauty, and an impetus for love. One of our most generous and versatile plants,  it holds up our hard clay foothills from erosion and gives us one of our first hopes of spring.

Miner’s lettuce is a wildling here in Northern California, so I was surprised to find it in Johnny’s Selected Seeds, a catalogue from Maine. On second thought, though, it makes sense: miner’s lettuce is something you harvest in early spring, here: Johnny’s lists it as a cold-weather salad green.

Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata, sometimes found as Montia perfoliata) has that name because the gold miners used it for hard-to-find greens. Groceries were not in steady supply in gold rush days, and if you were on the claim or at a big mine, it was a day’s trip to town to get them. Even then, you were unlikely to find much garden produce; food supplies ran to stodge, things that lasted under the long slow unrefrigerated shipping conditions of the time, and they weren’t cheap (European versions of California agriculture were in their infancy). In those days, many European Americans still didn’t know that greens could stave off scurvy and other diseases (Claytonia has a high vitamin C content), but even the miners who were ignorant must have craved greens by the end of winter.

Probably they learned about claytonia from the Maidu, who knew everything about the plants here and, unlike the miners, knew not to destroy their food sources by cutting them down or digging up large tracts of earth. The Maidu name for claytonia is wedakdaka (wuh-DOK-dokka).

Western claytonia is related to spring beauty (Claytonia virginica), the little cormous pink wildflower of the eastern woodlands. You can see the relationship in the miner’s lettuce flower, though its membership in the purslane family is only evident in the crisp juiciness of the stems and leaves.

Miner’s lettuce can be a low-water plant if it’s grown to time with seasonal rains. In our no-rain summers, it comes up in late winter, goes through early spring, and then dies off when the weather warms up and dries off, only to come back another year. Though it spreads into little patches, it isn’t invasive under these conditions, and would be a good plant to consider for filling in holes in the low-water garden. It will die off conveniently just when warm-weather plants are beginning to feel their strength. In more conventional, watered, garden settings, Johnny’s says that miner’s lettuce is suitable for multiple cuttings. The native plant books I have give it a long growing period, from February to June,; that’s probably because every hillside and altitude here has a different timing for winter and spring; the claytonia would grow any time after that first spring surge in February, for as long as the ground is still moist and the air is still cool. In my area, it would be unusual to see this plant as late as May, when native grasses and flowers begin to dry up.

Miner’s lettuce is happiest in moist semishade (too much sun will burn the leaves). Sierra Wildflowers  (Niehaus) and Sierra Nevada Natural History (Storer and Usinger) both say that claytonia likes shade, but in decades of observing claytonia, I’ve never seen them thrive where they don’t get at least a little filtered sun each day. Sierra Wildflowers says they grow in foothill woodlands, mixed coniferous forests, and chapparal; they’re not high-mountain plants. They also seem happy in people’s yards, especially around spigots or under trees at the edge of the clearing.

While it doesn’t grow at high altitudes, claytonia can grow in moderate frost or cold greenhouses. Sierra Wildflowers says it’s grown as a salad green in Europe, which often picks up on the beauty and usefulness of our wild plants before we do.

If you want to try claytonia as a crop, here’s an important piece of information that might keep you from weeding it out by mistake: it has an odd growth pattern. When it comes up, you wouldn’t associate the skinny-leaved rosettes

with the broad leaves that come later. This picture shows they are one and the same plant;
you can see the broad first leaves emerging among the thin ones.

The pink-purple flowers make tiny flourishes as the broad leaves age. They are pleasant to see, but they mark the end of claytonia as salad: it gets drier and more bitter as flowering advances.

Claytonia’s a labor-intensive crop to pick; the leaves are at most two and a half inches across, with many of them only about an inch in diameter (richer soils get you bigger leaves). But gathering them in cool weather is fun, and the leaves and cut-up stems make pretty and vitamin-rich additions to a salad, or nice eating right off the plant, as you walk by. I once brought a miner’s lettuce salad to a potluck and received many oohs and ahs. I think this is probably due to the novelty of the round leaves as much as anything, but it was gratifying seeing these townsfolk enjoy the food I’d gathered in the woods.

The list in the last post was made of Digitalis purpurea variants (ones I hadn’t already posted about).

This post is a list for those who like to fantasize about the strange and unusual: mostly perennial, mostly species foxgloves. Any foxgloves which look as if they have flowers like D. laevigata automatically go off my wish list, but that doesn’t mean they won’t look just fine on yours.

Digitalis cariensis subsp. trojana, offered by Sequim Rare Plants, is creamy, with amber gold throats and a long, bright white tongue. A great description which makes me want it, even without a photo, especially since it’s a perennial. SRP says this foxglove does better when it gets afternoon shade and regular watering. It’s shorter than some, usually about 30” (about 3/4 of a meter) tall. and hardy to zone 6, or 5 with protection.

Digitalis ferruginea – A late-blooming perennial from Southern Europe, whose blooms are described as creamy yellow flecked with rusty brown. They are also described as rusty red, more in keeping with the common name of this plant, rusty foxglove. It can run tall – between 3 to 6 feet (about 1 to 2 meters) is the rather vague designation – and it’s another one of those biennial-or-perennial types. (Usually, this means one or two seasons of bloom.) A cultivar, ‘Gigantea Gelber Harold’ is purported to have large pure yellow flowers from June to August, coming in at 5 feet.  The pictures show flowers that look similar to D. laevigata.

Digitalis ‘Goldcrest’, which I found at Jackson and Perkins, was at first a mystery: it might be a purpurea variation, I thought (the flowers look the right shape), or it might be some variant of Digitalis obscura: annoyingly, J&P declines to give botanical names, nor do they bother to tell you whether it’s a biennial or perennial, so there’s no way of knowing. ‘Goldcrest’ is a pretty looking flower, “flushed with gold, apricot, and rose, with dark brown freckles” as the copy says; a kind of deeper, darker ‘Sutton’s Apricot’. Fortunately, the 2009 Plant Delights catalogue arrived to solve the mystery. ‘Goldcrest’ is another name for ‘Waldigone’, a cross of Digitalis grandiflora and Digitalis obscura, so it is perennial, “a nice clump-former, adorned with small glossy evergreen foliage, topped throughout the summer with 18” (45 cm) branched spikes of large apricot flowers, each higlighted by interior brown specks.” The Plant Delights photo shows a much less vividly-colored flower than the J&P photo. This could  be from soil and climate differences, cultivar differences, or vividness by computer manipulation.

Digitalis grandiflora is one of  strawberry foxglove’s parents, and that is where I have described what I know of it.

Digitalis lanata (means “woolly”) is also called ‘Grecian foxglove’, even though it’s not the same as the D. laevigata ‘Grecian foxglove’ I discussed earlier. (Yet another reason for Latin names.) It is a hardy biennial or perennial with creamy yellow flowers – always a great color in a flower, if you ask me.  As perennial foxgloves seem to do, it flowers in late rather than early summer. Digitalis lanata hails from Greece and the Danube, quite a spread of territory. Perhaps it traveled in the hands of the flower-loving Ottoman Turks. I have tried getting this foxglove from seed numerous times, and never managed it. I’ve never seen a plant of it, so I haven’t had the opportunity see it that way, either. I would love to bring it to flower at least once, just to see it.  Seed germinates in about 26 days (a lunar cycle) at 70 degrees F. Available at JL Hudson.

Digitalis lutea, or Straw Foxglove, is native to North Africa and Europe. Its species name, “lutea” means “yellow”, and it’s possible that “straw” refers to the type of yellow. A picture in Antique Flowers shows it with tiny narrow blooms of buff yellow. This is yet another of the ones that I have seeded year after year, with no result.  But I would like to grow it. Yellow to white inch-long flowers, dark green foliage, and perennial habit sound good to me. JL Hudson quotes Jelitto and Schacht in his catalogue, as commending, “ A noteworthy, graceful, long-lived, lime-loving species.” So maybe liquid calcium will encourage it to sprout. We can but hope.

Digitalis obscura, a Spanish perennial, offers an entirely different type of foxglove experience. Its ombre-dyed orange bells remind me more of aloe flowers than D. purpurea, at least judging by the picture in the High Country Gardens catalogue. Perhaps the camera lies: HCG calls the flowers yellow-and-brown.  (HCG offers plants only. If you prefer growing from seed, you can get them from JL Hudson, who says the seeds germinate in 1 to 2 weeks. In my experience, that’s quick for a foxglove.) The flowers of D. obscura don’t have the closed-in look of D. laevigata & co., but they do look smaller and narrower than D. purpurea flowers, and they hang their heads more heavily. The leaves are reputed to be evergreen and lilylike, and the plant can go woody, like a lavender or sage.  D. obscura does well in full or partial sun, and grows to about 18” (about half a meter) tall by 12” (about 30 cm) wide, the kind of miniaturization you often see in plants from the mountains. Its mountain home also means, I’m guessing, that it likes a well-drained, mineral-rich soil. It’s certainly a low-water plant, though I would also make that case for Digitalis purpurea.

Digitalis parviflora ‘Milk Chocolate’ – Frances of Fairegarden  brought my attention to this foxglove. Since what I can see of the photo shows the same closed-bell flower as D. laevigata, I probably won’t be fighting to get this one into my garden – though I am intrigued by brown flowers at the moment.  And the shape of the spikes is cool. I  might succumb.

Digitalis thapsi ‘Spanish Peaks’ -  Goodwin Creek Gardens says that this perennial foxglove is small, growing about 1’ x 1’ (about 30 cm each way).  They describe the spikes as reddish purple, attractive to hummingbirds. The leaves are fuzzy, and it grows in partial hade to full sun, z. 4-10. Needs well-drained soil. Select Seeds confirms that this cultivar is from Spain. That sounds obvious, but cultivar names can be tricky, since they’re often used to refer to the namer’s associations with the plant, rather than the plant’s association with its world. GCG describes ‘Spanish Peaks’ as two to four feet tall, and mentions that the flowers are spotted with deep maroon.

Digitalis viridiflora, from the Balkans, has greenish-yellow inch-long flowers, as the name suggests, A hardy perennial, Digitalis viridiflora flowers from June to August, and grows 2 to 4 feet tall. It likes moist soil, and fall sowing. I have a weakness for greenish-yellow flowers, and just think how cool it would look next to a wild Digitalis purpurea, if they flower at the same time. D. viridiflora is perennial, too. I’ll be trying this one soon. It’s available through JL Hudson.

As exhausted as you may be by the subject of foxgloves, I’m sure I haven’t covered them all. For an extensive list of foxgloves in cultivation, try: Hardy Plants . (But be forewarned; they haven’t got photographs. Strictly botanical information only.) If you have any favorite foxgloves – or just know of other varieties that deserve their turn – I hope you’ll leave a comment.