Tag Archives: striped

Into the May Woods Once Again

Posted on by
8

On Victoria Day weekend, with almost two warm weeks having elapsed since my first May wildflower foray into the woods flanking the dirt road near our cottage on Lake Muskoka, near Torrance, Ontario I was curious to see what else had come into bloom.  This time, knowing the blackflies and mosquitoes would be active, I came prepared with a Coghlan’s head net for my hat.  What a lifesaver that was!

As I left our place on the Page’s Point peninsula, I noticed the sand cherry in flower down by the shore. Prunus pumila is a plant not only of sandy shores along the Great Lakes, but of smaller lakes, too. It also emerges from soil in granite outcrops, like Lake Muskoka.

Spring bees love the sand cherry flowers. This is an andrena mining bee.

Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) were in flower, too. Fingers crossed for sufficient rain to produce fruit.

I also noticed the rather subtle flowers of limber honeysuckle (Lonicera dioica), another Muskoka native.

Further down the path was a little stand of gaywings, aka fringed milkwort (Polygala paucifolia).

Back on the dirt road, hepatica, spring beauty and dogtooth violet were all finished, but I found some sweet little downy yellow violets (V. pubescens) in the grassy centre of a neighbour’s driveway.

Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was now in full bloom.

False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) was just about to flower…..

…. .and across the road, little starflower was becoming used to its new name, Lysimachia borealis (formerly Trientalis).

I stepped down into the wetland on either side of the road to get a better look at the violet that my Field Botanists of Ontario Facebook page had identified for me in my last blog. You can see it in the mud under the emerging royal ferns (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis). It’s called Macloskey’s violet or small white violet (Viola macloskeyi) and is native to much of northeast N. America. This is when I really appreciated my bug veil!

Here’s a close-up look at the violet.

In the wetland on the opposite side of the road, cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) had mostly unfurled since my last visit.

There were masses of Macloskey’s violets here too, but what was that white flower at the edge of the swale?

It was wild calla or water arum (Calla palustris) – my first time seeing this lovely marginal aquatic plant.

Wild calla bears the spathe-and-spadix floral arrangement typical of the Arum family (Araceae). According to the Illinois Wildflowers site: “The spadix has mostly perfect (bisexual) flowers… These small flowers are densely arranged across the entire surface of the spadix and they are numerous. Each perfect flower has a green ovoid pistil that is surrounded at its base by 6-9 white stamens”. Flies are its principal pollinators. After flowering ends, the spathe and spadix both turn green. As fruit develops, it turns bright-red.

I actually made a little video of my foray into the wet areas and you can hear the mosquitoes in the blue violet segment, as well as the lovely Muskoka birds. It ends with the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) further up the dirt road.

The shock which this device generates had a negative affect when these men were performing sex and during this phase, men can attain hard penile erection which they can hold for longer duration of cialis wholesale online time. Nearly all adult men tend not to realize that will you shouldn’t have for you devensec.com viagra sample to undergo. Massive Downtime Slash In case a company does not have to always take the long trip to the doctor for its advice if patient has diseases/problems such as- stroke, leukemia, buy cialis canada multiple myeloma, heart problems, anemia, blood pressure problem’s, kidney or liver problems. This is levitra discount an exceptionally prominent pill which is implied for the men who experience the ill effects of the issue erectile brokenness that is a sexual issue.

The chokecherries had just been in bud two weeks earlier, but were now in full flower….

….. and hosting native bees as well as this little beetle.

In the woods, beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) had leafed out.

Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) grew here and there on shallow soil atop rock outcrops.

I saw exactly one rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens) but it was difficult to capture with my cellphone so I’ve added a camera closeup from a previous spring behind our own cottage.

And of course loads of wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).

The forest floor under this sugar maple seedling (Acer saccharum) was thickly carpeted with the leaves of countless species still awaiting their time to shine – or perhaps never rising at all, but merely part of the great fabric of nature here.

There were also seedling oaks, both red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). The latter, in this neck of the woods, never seems to get bigger than a small scrubby tree.

Those oak photos were the last ones I made for 30 minutes because I got turned around and lost in the woods. It was only for a half-hour, but it felt like hours. I climbed over and under downed trees and came to hemlock stands and fairly high cliffs, beyond which lay… more forest. Since it was mid-afternoon, I followed the sun, thinking I needed to go south – but I was in fact walking more west than south.  Nothing looked familiar – I was really lost, and getting thirsty in the heat!   Feeling a growing sense of panic, I called my husband Doug back at the cottage. “You need to veer left as you’re looking at the sun to find the dirt road,” he said. Within 10 minutes I started to recognize some of the plants I’d seen earlier and then I heard the voices of children and saw the roof of a truck heading down the dirt road. Whew!  Next time I won’t wander without taking water and leaving a trail of cookie crumbs! (Note to self: also get compass and GPS apps on phone.)  The arrows below with our cottage marked in red approximate my wanderings.

When I got back to the dirt road, I found the first instar of the gypsy moth caterpillars that will  ravage our Muskoka oak and pine trees this summer. Very tiny, it was crawling up the leaf of striped maple or moose maple (Acer pensylvancum) which was also sporting its pendant green flowers. Some of my readers will recall my 2020 blog A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka in which I described how I used a homemade oil spray to kill the egg masses.

Heading back to the cottage, I found maple-leaf viburnum (V. acerifolium) in bud…..

….. and a few trilliums that had not yet withered in the unseasonal May heat. And I had learned a few valuable lessons about going into the Muskoka bush alone!

**************

If you want to read about my meadow gardens in Muskoka, have a look at this blog from 2017, Muskoka Wild – Gardening in Cottage Country.

In Praise of the Little Bulbs

Posted on by
11

After five long months of wintry weather in Toronto, there is nothing more uplifting than the first flowers of the small spring bulbs. Over many years, small bulbs and corms in my front garden have multiplied, their clumps becoming gradually bigger, or seeds have scattered about until there are pools of colour. My camera finger is always itchy after being out of service since the last of the fall colour dies down, so I head outdoors as often as I can. In this spring of self-isolation, that might be several times a day and I’m often greeted by neighbours stopping to see what’s in bloom. The cold March and April temperatures have made the flowering parade move as slowly as sap up a maple trunk, but every year starts the same – with the snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis). Because they can easily be moved in flower, I have been dividing this old snowdrop clump and digging sections into my front garden.

I’ve also made a habit through the years of cutting these tiny flowers and giving them the high-fashion studio treatment, like the snowdrops below in an antique shot glass.

Next to emerge is usually a tie between species crocuses and little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’. I adore her. She was bred in 1955 in England by E. Bertram Anderson  Her mother is pale yellow Iris winogradowii hailing from the Caucasus mountains. That gives her extreme cold hardiness and her tendency to shrug off snow.

Her father is pale purplish blue I. histrioides from Turkey, lending her the pretty pale blue hue. Her existence is the result of only 2 seeds produced in open pollination breeding work by Anderson, a founding member of the RHS Joint Rock Garden Plant Committee and president of the Alpine Garden Society from 1948-53. She flowered in 1960 and was named for the wife of Anderson’s friend Eliot Hodgkin

This year, my crocuses were wonderful, both the species “tommies” (Crocus tommasinanus) and the bigger, slightly later-flowering Dutch hybrids.

On the one warm day we experienced so far this April, I found honey bees foraging for pollen on the crocuses. I’ve always wondered who in my neighbourhood has beehives, since the property size requirements for beekeeping are fairly stringent in Toronto. Having done a little research, I think they likely originated in the hives on the roof of Sporting Life department store about a half-mile from my garden.

I often combine these early bloomers in a tiny bouquet. Even though they last only a few days, the joy they bring is in inverse proportion to their size.

Crocuses, of course, have their own chalice-like charm – even if they decline to stay open long once removed from sunshine.

My front garden in early spring is anything but neat, given that I mulch it with leaves in autumn and leave many cut perennial stems to biodegrade where they fall. I do lighten the leaf mulch in late winter a little, raking some off so the small bulbs don’t get lost in the duff. This is a side-by-side view of my front garden this spring on March 23rd and April 13th. Once the crocuses fade, the Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) starts to turn my entire garden azure-blue. Most springs, the native cellophane bee and bumble bees make great use of the scilla carpet, but this year’s temperatures have kept most bees in their nests.

My garden’s “blue period” also includes the amazing, rich-pink Corydalis solida ‘George Baker’.

I always love the combination below, ‘George Baker’ with glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa).  A few weeks ago, I divided some of my corydalis clumps while in flower and spotted them throughout the garden. That deep cherry-pink is too good not to spread around!

And, of course, I’ve given George his own studio cameos in the past as well……

The glory-of-the-snow has been ready for its closeup….

…. as has the cultivar ‘Violet Beauty’.

Striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides) are ultra-hardy little bulbs featuring pale-blue flowers with a darker blue stripe.

Here’s a closer look of that sweet striped face.

Between the Siberian squill, the glory-of-the-snow and the striped squill, the colour theme of these chilly weeks of early spring is most definitely blue. And with most everyone in Toronto now into their second month of self-isolation, the neighbours have been telling me how much they’re enjoying watching my front garden change every week.

This was a little bouquet I made on April 6th, happy that there were still a few orange crocuses to give it some zing.
Images and formatting: Why do my emails look broken?Broken email campaigns are an increasing concern tadalafil 100mg among email marketers, especially since several companies and web-based email providers now block graphics as a measure to combat spam. NAION can also affect people who * Have heart disease of nay kind are dehydration, due to extended vomiting and diarrhea, severe blood loss and some inflamed organs of the cialis without prescription body. Kamagra is an excellent formula that enables one with the long lasting performance of the males after getting indulged into foreplay & thus, the medical professionals of Food & Drug Association (FDA) & this has been opted by a number of people. viagra online secretworldchronicle.com There may be tadalafil tablets in india some times when you and the partner leading to sexual dissatisfaction.

White Siberian squill (Scilla siberica ‘Alba’) come out a little later than the blue ones.

Photographing them in a tiny bouquet lets me appreciate details of their flowers that often go unnoticed when they flower en masse.

Among my favourite of the small spring flowers are Greek windflowers or wood anemones (Anemone blanda). These are tubers, rather than bulbs, and they need to be soaked for 24 hours prior to being planted in autumn.  Their daisy-like flowers always cheer me up – though they only open wide when the sun is shining.  This cultivar is ‘Blue Shades’.

Putting just one windflower in the tiniest vase reveals the beautiful contrast of the bright yellow stamens with the silky petals and fern-like leaves.

‘Pink Charmer’ is lovely, but tends to be mauve….

….. and finally there’s ‘White Splendor’.

My broad-leaved grape hyacinths (Muscari latifolium) have just emerged and are still tight. The light flowers at the top are sterile, while the deep-purple ones at the base are fertile.

Here they are, below, in a little salt shaker vase.  Common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum) emerge just a little bit later.

Along my sideyard path under a big black walnut tree is a colony of Corydalis solida that comes into bloom a little later than the pink ‘George Baker’ in my front garden. This species is very vigorous and will make its way around the garden and even pop up in the lawn. In fact some gardeners consider it a weed – but I adore it. And after it finishes flowering, its leaves turn yellow quickly in the thicket of Solomon’s seal just emerging, then it disappears until next year. You might also see it hybridizing with some of the colourful cultivars, if you can find them to order.

Like all these little spring treasures, it is such fun to snip a handful to bring indoors so they can be appreciated for their beauty up close.

Soon the forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) will be in flower. I have loads of these biennials throughout the garden and their season is very long. By the time my crabapple tree is in bloom along with later tulips and daffodils, they will be pale blue clouds underneath.

But for now, I enjoy adding the very first forget-me-not blossoms to the little bulb bouquets that now include common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum)……

….. and the native Confederate violets (Viola sororia var. priceana).

All this early beauty of the little bulbs, this re-affirmation that spring brings colourful renewal – especially this year, when we need it so desperately – is one of the most beloved aspects of my own garden. I simply would not be without my snowdrops, crocuses, corydalis, puschkinia, scilla or grape hyacinths. And then, as if by magic, all these wondrous little chorines of the first act will quietly wither and disappear under the later weeks of tulips, daffodils, camassias and the emerging foliage of summer perennials, lying dormant below the soil surface so they can perform the same miracle early next spring.  Needless to say, the foliage of all spring bulbs must be allowed to turn yellow and ripen in order for continued photosynthesis to nurture the bulbs as long as possible.

Meanwhile, my garden moves on through myriad subsequent scenes, not in the least hindered by all these tiny bulbs that helped me bid farewell to winter. Here is my front garden over the space of twelve months. This year I’m filled with anticipation – and nothing but time to enjoy it.

**************

I buy almost all of my spring bulbs from my friend Caroline deVries’ online retail store flowerbulbsrus. They are available at reduced prices until August 31st and are excellent quality.  A good selection of the small bulbs is also available at www.botanus.com in British Columbia; they ship throughout Canada. (I purchased my own cultivars of Corydalis solida in Canada from gardenimport, which sadly is no longer in business).  In the U.S., small spring bulbs can be purchased from my friends Brent and Becky Heath at https://www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com/. They have discounts for ordering before July 1st.

**************

If you love spring bulbs, you might want to read my blog on my favourite daffodils and one of tulip design in the spring garden courtesy of the Toronto Botanical Garden, or my visit to the spectacular Abbotsford Tulip Festival.

The Painted Hills of Oregon

Posted on by
4

This week last September, we were cruising across Oregon, where we had earlier visited Ecola State Park on the coast and I’d had the pleasure of touring both the Japanese Garden and Chinese Garden in Portland. Golf with my husband’s college friends took up a few days in Portland and Bend and then we were on our own. We drove northeast from beautiful Bend through the high desert, below, towards some fascinating geologic sites I’d researched for our road trip itinerary.

Once upon a time, some 400 million years ago or so, what is now the state of Oregon lay under the Pacific Ocean. Idaho formed the western coast of the continent and Oregon (and Washington and parts of California) consisted of volcanic island arcs, i.e. “exotic terranes” on the ocean floor that were too big to slide under the subduction zone as the Juan de Fuca (Pacific) plate slowly moved under the North American plate. As this excellent page from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries states: “Instead, they remained in the subduction zone and welded themselves to the edge of the growing plate. The result we see today is a fascinating array of varied rocks; thick slices of the oceanic crust, limestone with tropical corals, volcanic seamounts, shiny blue-green serpentinite, and large areas of totally crushed and broken rock called mélange, produced by the incredible forces of two tectonic plates smashing together.”

Over the next 270 million years, magma from deep within the earth was injected into these rocks, fusing them together. After that, sediments were deposited on top in the form of sandstone and mudstone. The Coast Range (including the Cascade Mountains) emerged from this collision of plates. Fifty two million years ago, as the subduction zone between the two major plates moved west, hundreds of volcanic eruptions formed a large volcanic shield (the Ancient Arc) under two-thirds of the eastern part of Oregon. These major volcanoes, including calderas, continued until 20 to 6 million years ago, forming thick layers of lava flows and tuff. Much younger volcanoes continue to erupt in the region today. I saw vivid evidence of this while my husband was golfing in Bend, when I drove to Lava Butte nearby. Formed 7,000 years ago from a cinder cone associated with the Newberry Caldera (80,000 years ago) sending fluid basalt over a huge region, it was eerily beautiful. Here’s a look at the landscape, with the volcanic mountains on the Cascade Range in the distance.

But we were an hour northeast of Bend now on Highway 26 as we drove through the remnants of a 2014 forest fire, the Waterman Complex, that devastated almost 12,000 acres of the Ochoco National Forest.

An hour later, the landscape ahead became more dramatic.

Geology is one of my great fascinations in life. Though I’m not an expert at all, it is so interesting to travel in and among these rugged artifacts from deep time – or, as author John McAfee called them in his wonderful Pulitzer-prize-winning book, these “Annals of the Former World”.  Just three months earlier, we had visited friends in Utah who had toured us through Zion Canyon National Park where the Virgin River has scoured a gorge through a canyon of Navajo sandstone estimated to be 175-250 million years old……

….and Bryce Canyon National Park, below, with its thousands of hoodoos carved via erosion from 50-million year old iron-rich, limy, sedimentary rock (Claron Formation). Both Zion and Bryce are part of the Grande Escalante of the American West, the “grand staircase” of rock formations leading down to the Grand Canyon, which is still on my bucket list. One day there will be a blog!

Yellowstone Park with its spectacular volcanic history…

…. and the Grand Tetons (9 million years old) were a thrill to visit and blog about back in 2016. Click on those links, especially if you love geothermal features!

Even when I drive on Highway 169 to Gravenhurst, the town near our Ontario cottage a few hours north of Toronto, to buy groceries I sometimes stop to photograph particularly good specimens of “banded gneiss”. below. Roughly 1.4 billion years old and part of the Grenville Province of North America’s Precambrian Shield, i.e. the stable, non-volcanic, boring part of the North American craton, it is metamorphic rock that was twisted and roiled and compressed as it formed part of an ancient mountain system, now long eroded away.

As I “stop for rock”, I sometimes ponder that we take for granted visits to museums to see cultural artifacts of our human history, but are less interested in these rocks that bear witness to ancient geologic events and render our own stay on the planet as a mere dust mote in time. I suppose it gives me a sense of existential perspective. So it was a given that when we drove through Eastern Oregon, the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument with its three far-flung “units”would be on my “must-see” list.  Almost two hours out of Bend, we turned off Highway 26 onto Burnt Ranch Road (aka Bridge Creek Road), and as we rounded a curve I snapped my first phone shot of a “painted hill”. In the late afternoon light, the colours were spectacular.

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) is the predominant shrub in the high desert here and I waded in to get a better shot.

Annual sunflowers (Helianthus annuus), the grandparent of all our colourful, tall sunflowers, grew by the side of road.   But this wasn’t the main show – that was still a bit down the road.

Minutes later, I made my husband stop the car on the entrance road to capture the wide view.

We pulled into the small parking lot at the Painted Hills Overlook…..

……. and visited the interpretive signs in the rustic shelter.

The Painted Hills form one of three “units” of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. National Monuments are similar to national parks, but generally smaller, with less focus on recreation and more on some notable natural feature.  The Painted Hills are considered one of the Seven Wonders of Oregon.  This late in the afternoon, we would only be able to get to this site, but hoped to visit one more on our drive north the following morning.  Who was John Day? Turns out he had nothing to do with geology, but was a fur trapper sent out by John Jacob Astor (Astoria Oregon) in 1811 who had the misfortune of being robbed on a river that meanders through the area, the Mah-Hah. When people passed the spot, they said that’s where poor John was robbed, so it became the John Day River. (Not the most auspicious naming for a national monument, but… oh well.)

The next signs explained the significance of the colours of the soil in the hills, which span a period roughly 39-30 million years ago. Technically, they’re called “paleosols”, which means “ancient soils that have been re-exposed.” The red, iron-oxide-rich “laterite” soil originated in floodplain deposits when this part of Oregon was warm and humid with rainfall of 33-51 inches per year and lots of ponds and lakes.

The yellowish/tan/grey soils are mudstone, siltstone or shale which formed from sediments deposited on an ancient river floodplain. Drier than the red soil eras, rainfall would have been 27-37 inches per year, as compared to modern rainfall year of 12 inches annually.

The Google Earth view of the Painted Hills shows the swirls of red laterite soil.  According to the National Park Service: “The green colors may indicate the clay celadonite (blue), the zeolite clinoptilolite (yellow) or reduced iron. The buff colors are close to the original color of the ash*. Almost all of these layers have been reworked and altered by pedogenic (soil-building) processes.”  (*ash from Oregon’s volcanic past)
Therefore these techniques and medications have been invented to help cure the online levitra problem. Within a few years of launching, Kamagra got successful to achieve fame and hearts viagra prescription for woman of millions of worldwide users. Thrush is also commonly referred to as yeast infection, Candida http://robertrobb.com/is-trump-an-existential-threat/ purchase generic cialis infection, Candidasis, Moniliasis or Oidiomycosis. Make your life more viagra sales in australia enjoyable with exciting nights with the regular intake of these ayurvedic capsules.

Because of the lateness of the day, we only viewed the hills from the main viewpoint, walking just a short distance to get some slightly different vantage points.

But visitors with more time can take a number of hiking trails at the Painted Hills, some of which give you a high-angle view and others that bring you very close to the soil itself.  I loved the “elephant foot” look of the formations here, which is simply the product of erosion from rain and snow.  The black layers are lignite, which is the fossilized or carbonized residue of vegetative matter that once grew on the floodplain.

 

 

I assume that the other mountains and hills in the background, once they erode over thousands of years, will also expose these older layers lying far beneath their tree-studded surfaces.

It’s tempting to think these layers happened over a short time, but the coloured strata would be separated by many thousands or millions of years. It’s hard to get one’s mind around the time scales of deep time.

I could have photographed here for hours (and now wish I had, of course!)

Vegetation is extremely sparse on the Painted Hills, as you see below, where some of the western junipers have died. According to the US Geological Survey, the Painted Hills’ “surface weathering relatively quickly breaks down these rocks into a clay-rich surface coating that easily erodes during summer flash floods and/or winter storms. The high clay content and rapid erosion during infrequent storms prevents plants from becoming established in the badlands areas”. But whereas nothing seems to grow in the iron-rich red soil, I put on my zoom lens to capture the little….

…. bunchgrasses at the top of one of the hills featuring the yellowish, silty soil. With some help from my botanist friends on Facebook, I believe this is bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata, syn. Agropyron spicata).

As we headed out, I photographed a large mountain with a flat ridge. Later I discovered it is the Carroll Rim. According to the US Geological Survey: “The hill (about 500 feet high) is called Carroll Rim and was the source of many fossils early in the exploration of the John Day region. The Picture Gorge Ignimbrite (a massive volcanic tuff deposit) caps the hill (technically called a cuesta). This massive volcanic deposit overlies sedimentary beds of the middle Turtle Cove Member of the John Day Formation.” The Turtle Cove member is dated to about 29 million years ago and the ignimbrite capping to 16 million years ago, so you can see how the younger rock formations are higher than the Painted Hills. The next morning, we would see very dramatic evidence of the Picture Gorge Ignimbrite en route to Walla Wall. That’s in my next blog!

Time was getting on, so we got back in the car and drove nine miles southeast past teetering columnar Picture Gorge Basalt formations…..

….to the tiny town of Mitchell (population 124), where we had reserved a room at The Oregon Hotel.

It is pretty funky, little Mitchell, with the standard feed store to supply the local farmers……

…… and a gift shop dressed up for autumn…..

…… and an eclectic rockhound/fossil dealer who’d left his inventory unattended and driven off somewhere in his truck. Clearly there’s not a lot of crime in Mitchell.

This painting at the feed store captured the 1860s gold rush in Oregon – perhaps when prospectors arrived in Bridge Creek nearby.

That morning in Bend, while Doug played his last golf game, I shopped for deli dinner supplies at Safeway and packed them in a cooler with a nice bottle of Oregon wine. We ate at a patio table outside the cabin…..

….. while watching a five-point buck eat the hotel owner’s garden and listening to the sound of California quail in the forest nearby as the sky darkened.

Then it was time to hit the sack, which was a very comfortable, clean sack.  For tomorrow would present more geologic discoveries from this fascinating part of Oregon!