precocious growth

Soft new leaves of the next growing season: waterleaf, Hydrophyllum
Spotted in Marquam 12/27/2014.

Circling

Today my patch of urban forest felt like the BIG woods. Shortly after noon I set out for a short loop hike; the sky was clear and blue, and I could pinpoint the location of the sun in the sky: low, as we near the winter solstice. The air was sunny and warm, yet creeks were noisy with recent rainstorm run-off. This unusual combination took my imagination to much, much larger forest systems.

As I left the canopy to return to boxes and paved streets, I saw chunks of cloud flying north across the sky, then a grey mass covered the recently sunny southern sky. A REALLY gusty system blew in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As I move about the city by foot or bike, I often experience conflicts with motorized traffic, much of it mental (or nasal, but that's another story). Why do we devote our cities to over-sized, noisy, stinky machines? My attitudes range from fear, to aggression, to imagining traffic as a great herd of metal cattle. Recently, this story jumped to mind and seemed most apt (retold in my own words as I don't know the source):

One day, the wind said to the sun, "See that woman there? I bet you I can take off her big coat."
So the wind blew down upon the woman, but she only tightened up the buttons on her coat. The wind blew harder, but she wrapped her arms about herself.
Then the sun said, "Let me try." He looked out from behind a cloud, and the woman relaxed her arms. He stepped full into the sky, warming everything below, and the woman took off her coat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

winter here
curl into a ball under covers
gently hold my heart

think of ice mountains
on a scale i can not fathom
be still, till clarity of mind returns

(journal entry Nov. 2010)

Equinox

The season is turning. A few weeks ago, a fresh layer of dropped leaves on the urban forest floor caught me by surprise -- most of them were still green.
 

It had been rather windy... but did the bigleaf maples care about the greenness they had yet to take back?

 

Some of that green is wanted by someone; they munched out the tasty softer bits between the veins of this red alder leaf.

 

Just a few days later, actual canopy color change seemed to hit the maples all at once.

While many things expanded to huge this summer season, not everything reached its full potential. As I began preparing a long neglected summer garden for its next season, this tiny cucumber was discovered beneath larger leaves.

season rolls on

In the forest, Oemleria is letting go of her leaves. Fast to get started on spring, quick to begin fall...

While thimbleberry still has scars from a spring hailstorm.

 

In the garden, pumpkins have long outgrown their hole-punched leaves, zucchinis hide and grow to surprising size + first ripe tomato!

heat of the day

First ripe blackberries, on Barbur! Oh yeah, dark expanse of heat absorbing and reradiating pavement.

Meanwhile, the sky:

Petal Sepal Confusion

How do plants keep petals and sepals separate? I found a trillium (Trillium ovatum) that doesn't.

This is a trillium, its three originally white petals fading pink in late spring. The petals rest on three pointed green sepals. Below the flower are three large photosynthetic organs, which I just learned are technically not leaves, but bracts!

And this is a trillium that looks to have merged its petals and sepals into one structure. Huh.

summertime begins

First thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus) and osoberries (Oemleria cerasiformis) found ripe and eaten today + garden soil thirstily sucking down water = it's summer! 夏天！

Stormwater

With lady and maidenhair ferns, inside-out flower, and red huckleberry adding their chords to the growing symphony, the wood is really greening, but the canopy is still open.

Just before sunset of this very rainy day, the golden hour lit the woods vivid; the air was calm and sweet, but through the leprechaun scene a thick muddy snake rushed to the Willamette.

Gathering water from the streets and roofs farther up the hill, the small creeks swelled with runoff, gathered momentum, and thundered through the park. 

Chewing the bank at every turn, the rushing stream sculpted its channel. I could actually hear small rocks caught in the water slamming the insides of a metal culvert.  

 

Nettles 2014

Last day of February, new moon, mostly sunny and rather warm. Snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) letting out tiny leaves, Indian plum (Oemleria cerasiformis) raising amazing candelabras of flame-green leaves. 

And nettles -- still slightly small, but their unique flavor strong and welcome: stings into spring!

(Things are a little slower than 2010 so it seems)

Spring Indian plum candelabra

Nettling grounds

Stinging nettles (Urtica dioica)

February Fungus in the Urban Forest

Various fungus found in the urban forest this month. Some are perennial but others have just come up. Does the urban heat island expand the mushroom season of the urban forest, by bringing warmer temperatures deeper into the rainy season?

Frilly orange polypores, exploding out of an (alder?) log

Fresh, beautiful, black mushroom

 

Massively varnished, impressively layered conk

Itsy bitsy bright orange fungus

An old puffball, with moss growing out of it! Still expired spores when I poked it.

Marquam in the Snow

 

The eve of Snowpocalypse 2014 was cold and clear. Before scurrying on to some place warm, I stopped by Eagle Point, a mysterious spot and unsigned park.

Notice the rhododendron leaves above my bike - they're tucked down and curled under - yes, it was very cold.

Next afternoon the snow started to fall. And actually stick. And build. Here we see cars flooding down the hill from OHSU, getting out before steep hill roads grow more difficult.

 Immediately adjacent to machine madness, Marquam was calmly taking on the light dusting.

Usually bright, smiling, and green in cool, wet winter weather, licorice fern curled up in the cold. Was it simply drying out, or utilizing dry weather for spore dispersal, or both? Anyway, check out those sori!

 

 The next day, we had accumulation.

 Mini-mountains of snow mounded on spiky holly leaves.

This is a snow-topped, ivy-covered snag of some sort. Strange beast.

On Monday, things began to melt. Sheets of ice were slipping from the Marquam shelter roof.

And by Tuesday, the snow had its sentencing - warmer temperatures were in. Many urban streams were running chocolate-mud brown.

A record of strong foot traffic was kept by the snow... despite, or because of, the snow.

This 'sneckdown' shows there could be room for a bike lane or sidewalk (or raised bike path-sidewalk combination) along the short section of SW Sam Jackson Park Rd leading to the park's main entrance. More space allocated for bikes and pedestrians here would make accessing the park by non-car a lot less sketch.

Edible Invasives

Riding out highway 224 along the Clackamas River is one of the best ways to experience NW Oregon in late summer. I travelled this corridor in 2012 en route to forest camping.

Free refreshments were all along the road. I stopped often to pick sweet, sun-ripened blackberries.

A year later I travelled the route again, but vines that had supported fruit the year before were now just dead white bare branches, incapable of producing special regenerative berries.

Beans of the Summer

Scarlet runner beans are a peak summer vegetable with flashy red flowers and large, prolific pods. Immature pods are like a meaty green bean and the mature seeds can be used as a dry bean.

 

When immature, the beans are hot pink. Later on they develop dark speckles...

As they mature the pink darkens to purple, and even continues to deepen as the seeds age off the plant.

Last summer a trellis full of runner beans -- including scarlet and less colorful types -- fell over in my garden. I'd meant to save them for seed, but they weren't very dry when they fell. I shelled them and put them on a dehydrator.

 The treatment was too harsh, judging by the cracked seed coats.

Figuring the beans wouldn't store well and might not sprout at all, I rehydrated them in preparation for cooking.

But lots of them did sprout - go beans!

 Then I cooked and ate them.