Curated Landscapes

 “The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old.”

― Dan Groat

I was walking through a magnificent stand of Oregon White Oaks this week, meeting with a farmer who had spent a long lifetime creating a prisitne pasture under the stately trees. This past winter an epic ice storm, the likes of which hasn't been seen in Oregon in several lifetimes reduced this stand to broken crowns and massive piles of broken branches. I've written about the ice storm here a few times as it was a career changing event for me, and one that I hope doesn't come again in several more lifetimes, the damage it did to the oldest generation of Quercus garryana was profound. Lot's of trees were damaged, like Birches and Ash but the Old Garry oaks around here took it the worst. 
This post is part essay and part tutorial. I'm going to speak about the role of succession in landscapes, the changing climate and the role of humans in modifying both climate and landscape. I'm also going to walk through the process of collecting and cleaning Madrone seeds. For the past 15 years now, I've collected the ripe berries of Arbutus menziesii, cleaned them and sown the small seeds, doing something over and over again for 15 years will give a person an appreciation for the task and also teaches one about the succession of seed to mature tree. Follow along as we discuss the Curated Landscape and learn how to take a berry and make a tree. 

The ripe Madrone berries are harvested in Late-October to early November, the key being to beat the birds to them. In a late grape harvest year, (I'm surrounded by vinyards) I often don't have too much competition, however I have also put it on the schedule to harvest berries in a day or two and come out to find a thousand starlings had taken my crop down to almost nothing in a matter of an hour. The tree behind me is 14 years old and was grown from a seed collected from an old victorian in the Woodstock neighborhood somewhere around 58th and Tolman, in Portland, you can see by the amount of flowers it's a very prolific selection and one I treasure in my grove of seed grown madrones. 

The curated landscape of the Willamette valley gets talked about a lot these days, it was a myriad of complex wetlands, rich bottomland interspersed with oxbow side channels and horseshoe lakes formed by the North bound flow of the Wal-lamt as the native Kalapuyan seemed to have called the river. Meaning Spillway, for the large falls at the site of now Oregon City. I've also read that they called it the whi-mal, mal being the Chinook word for river. In the uplands, great Oak savahnnas were formed where the indigenous people had started a practice of setting burns to release the landscape from encroaching shrubs and conifers that descended down by natures force into the valley from the Coast Range and the newly forming Cascade Mountain range. 

The Madrone Berries are set in a basket and allowed to dry down for a few weeks, they will often get a deeper richer orange color and the fruit will harden up. This is important if you are doing the water extraction method I'm covering here, as it allows the fruit to produce a bit less pulp you'll have to sort through. 

The purpose of the burning was pragmatic, the indigenous peoples subsisted largely on digging Camas bulbs which grew in abundance in the rich river bottom land, hunting game was made easier by the open landscape, travel was also easier as well as the harvest of acorns from the mighty oaks that resisted the quick moving fire that burned through the grass and killed out the conifer seedlings and the shrubs that would quickly form vast thickets from the richness of the soil and the ample spring and winter rains. 

I have looked and looked for a rubber blender blade for my emersion blender, but in the absence of such a convienant item, I use instead a simple roll of electrical tape doubled over a few times to take the sharpness off the blades. The emersion blender works well since I can adjust the speed and also pulse start it. A nutribullet with one setting is not a good choice for this. 

Over time these frequently burned oak woodlands, became open, grassland like prairies where the mighty Oaks grew to enormous sizes and ages of 300+ years old. This is the landscape that the indigenous tribes curated out of the Willamette Valley. They knew that if they did nothing the Douglas Fir that formed thick forests along the slopes of the valley would move in and give the Deer and Elk a place to hide and make them harder to find. The osoberry or Indian Plum and Mahonia or Oregon grape would spread to shade out the Camas prairies where they could go and harvest the bulbs they used much like a potato, making them harder to harvest. They modified the landscapes to their needs to suit the lifestyle they lived as hunter/gatherers. 

The berries are loaded into the blender, the electricians tape covering the sharp blades and water added to just cover the berries. It takes some knowledge of how much to blend this concoction but the trick is to separate the berries from the seed without damaging the seeds. I usually set it to a pretty slow speed and do a good bit of pulsing, if it's your first time check often because the next step of seperating the fruit from the berries is made easier if you are just cracking and splitting the berries to release the seeds. This is also the reason you want to let the berries dry and harden a bit instead of whiling them up straight off the tree. 

These days there is a lot of talk in restoration circles about the importance of the oak trees in the Willamette Valley. Hundreds of years of fire suppression, the farmers plow, the introduction of invasive plants like the Armenian blackberry, English Ivy and Scotch Broom and urbanization has dramatically changed the valley's landscape. Douglas firs now dominate large parts of it, the blackberry, Ivy and scotch broom cover any unmanaged piece of earth in short order, especially if that ground was disturbed at all. The Oaks still exist, although often as scrubby, dwarfed versions competing for sunlight under the faster maturing Douglas firs, or as an solitary, relic that a farmer left to stand as a sentinal in the middle of a grass field. Small scattered islands of remnant prairie exists throughout the valley, where mature oak trees, widely spaced echo of the past, Salem's Bush's Pasture Park being a very urbanized example of this. 

The Madrone Pulp is then seived and filtered through colanders and cheesecloth to seperate out the cracked berries from the clean seed. I've heard of some people who just plant the whole mash and do well to propagate the trees this way. But I like to see a clean, dry seed sample so I usually spend the extra time it takes to seperate it out. Lot's of seeds float, and some sink. I've never done a germination comparison to see if there is a viability link that exists between the seed that floats and the seed that sinks.

For thousands of years the indigenous people modified the landscape of the Willamette Valley, then with Oregon Trail, manifest destiny and westward expansion came hundreds of years of modifying the landsdcapes of the Willamette Valley to a different set of standards. Now, with years of reflection, science based thought and the knowledge of history and restoration techniques comes the imposition of another set of standards to last who knows how long? All of these have been the ongoing "curation of the  landscape", whether it was the Santiam Band of the Kalapuyans setting fire to the flat bottomlands to make it easier to find food 2,000 years ago, or the white mans furrowing of the land for agriculture by oxen in the statehood years and then the earth moving for Cities and roads and Highways and the concrete and plastic of the post war years, to the modern age of "restoration" and "conservation"

Once sieved, I'll spread the seed on a paper towel to dry and after it's dried, funnel it into a glassine envelope for storage. Seeding usually takes place almost immediately as by the time all these steps have been completed it's usually the beginning of winter and Arbutus enjoy a cold, moist period to induce germination. 

Efforts to restore the now vastly different Willamette Valley Ecosystem back to a set point in time seem a bit like a war on nature to me. I truly appreciate what the indigenous people did to modify the landscape but the key there is they modified it. Humans have been modifying the landscape of  the Willamette valley for at least the last 8,000 years it seems. The Great Oak savahnnas and vast camas prairies that white man "discovered" were a curated landscape modified by thousands of years of a culture who needed the landscape to be a certain way to suit there needs. I think it's a bit close minded to look at a restoration project to modify a piece of this curated landscape back to a point in time that has cultural signficance but no real relevance today. I do firmly believe we should champion the protection of this deep cultural rooting in landscape modification. But it seems also necessary to realize that the culture has changed here and indeed the climate has as well. It's not been just the white mans plow and the rural fire districts who have been modifying the Oak Savahnna since the oppression and isolation of the indigenous tribes here,  it's nature doing it in a far more precise and controlled way then humans ever could. If we let nature run it's course the planet has the best chance of succeeding, if humans keep making an effort to return the landscape to a point in time 4,000 some years ago, we are probably not going to help either ourselves or the planet. Especially since you have to factor that landscape was something that nature was trying to get rid of itself. Hell, if you go back far enough in geological time, the Willamette valley was home to gingko trees and 20' tall tree ferns. Maybe we should pick that point in time, before man had any influence?

Quart pots of 3 year old Madrone seedlings sit ready for planting. I love this tree because it's a remarkably adaptable species, tolerating almost anything but waterlogged soils. If you have a dry spot and want a beautiful evergreen, attractive bark tree with character this is the native of choice if you ask me. 

The truth of any curated landscape is that it is humans attempting to dominate nature. Whether it's through fire, ax, saw or plow, concrete and gravel, native plant restoration and invasive weed control humans are curating the landscape to suit themselves. I think it's a bit of  crux in restoration ecology that we have chosen to pick a point in geological time and say this is the point to which we will now "restore" things to, as if nature won't keep changing to fight us. The case in point, the Willamette Valley's Oak Savannahs make a fine case study, because we have out of respect for a culture that did it first, picked that as a point to restore to. I do want to make clear that I support the indigenous people groups of this region and the efforts to restore their ancestral lands. But it is worth the conversation making that climate change, and 8,000 years of evolution have left humans with very different needs in a curated landscape. If we are returning to a hunter/gatherer survival mechanism than the oak savannahs make sense. They actually make a lot of sense from an urban/wildland fire interface as well, since the trees are fire adapted and the grasslands underneath produce a quick burning fire that can be more easily controlled. 

My wonderful 13 year old specimen of Arbutus xalapensis var texana that frames the rock garden actually set seed for the first time ever this year. That seed is so precious to me that I bagged it in panty hose to protect it from the birds. I'm not sure if it was maturity or the fact that it hit 115 degrees this summer that spurred it into fruit production but I'm happy it did and I hope to make a lot of babies of this beautiful tree. 

But those same oaks were absolutely hammered in the historic ice storm, my knowledge of horticultural pathology tells me that a lot of the ones that didn't die from toppling over or total crown loss, will probably be rife with disease issues in the next few years as all that wound wood was produced. This coupled with historic drought in the region, and historic high summer temperatures could spell the end of the oaks despite everyone's best intentions. I've noticed that in this day of rapidly changing climate there area great deal of restoration ecologists who refuse to look forward and are only looking backwards. Maybe it's time for a new branch of "restoration ecology" to develop that is forward thinking. Some scientists have argued and a website I saw agreed with them that given the unchecked and probably now unstoppable climate change underway that Salem, Oregon will actually have the climate of Davis, California in 20 years from now. Shouldn't we be planning for the rapid warming and changing ecosystem that science is saying we will be facing in 20 years instead of looking to recreate a curated landscape of 8,000 years ago? 

I've been planting Arbutus menziesii seeds every year for more than a decade now, but maybe I should be sowing more of these Arbutus xalapensis var. texana seeds as it hails from a hotter, drier climate. Much like science says our climate is headed for here in the Valley. 

Maybe the restoration efforts underway to return the valley to the curated landscape of 8,000 years ago should also consider some look toward the future. Perhaps the oak species should be changed to those that have survived eons in the Arid interior valleys of Central California, like the Blue Oak, the Valley Oak, the Canyon live oak etc. Maybe we should build some genetic diversity into the attempt to curate a landscape that developed as the Glaciers were retreating from the North American continent? If in 20 years Salem is Davis California then it would be best to start this process now, or it would have been better to start it 80 years ago. Let's stop talking about assisted migration like it's a bad thing and treat it for what it is, genetic diversity, ecosystem resilience and building adaptability into mans ever increasing attempt to dominate nature by curating landscapes. Man will always try to deal with change in the way that best suits the species, or in the most recent years the way that best suits the richest among the species. Maybe the mars trips are really the answer, as the planet cooks away and we got duped into thinking that we should be spending resources to restore our little part of the valley to a human influenced landscape that made sense 8,000 years ago? The Garry oak is a hardy, tough species, but if you look hard at the damage that was done to the population of them in a small swath of the valley this past year with it's highly volatile weather, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it might not be the answer to the future for landscapes in this part of the world. Lets look more to the future for all humans and not back to a time that doesn't exist anymore. Save what we can and make the rest more adaptable for survival in a harsh reality that is rapidly approaching.

I turn 45 tomorrow, and in 20 years I'll be hopefully hitting retirement age and if I'm lucking sipping ice tea under a spreading Quercus lobata, next to a grove of Texas Madrones and it will be 60 degrees in December and I won't have had to fly south to snowbird for the winter because the Willamette Valley will have the climate that is just right for the aching bones of a 65 year old man who spent his life alternating between professionally gardening, carpentry and paper shuffling for gubmint agencies conducting restoration ecology. 

Cheers, 

Mark