Binomials

"Fate is always against great things" 

                                     Carl Linnaeus

Where would we be if Carl Linnaeus hadn't given us the latin binomial system? Well I guess the term would just be something I had to learn in algebra and promptly forgotten. If I get asked if I speak a different language, I sometimes stammer out nemnoga, or un poco depending on the situation. But really when you think about it, rattling off genus and species on a walk around the garden or through the greehnhouse is speaking a language and sometimes I feel like I know it a bit better than the english version with all it's predicate adjectives and linking verbs to get to the point. 

Carl von Linneaus

I give Linnaeus props, he not only created his own system of science, essentially creating a language that I can understand. But when the beautiful genus Morae was named in honor of the English botanist Robert More, Linnaeus had the balls to change the spelling to Moraea as it was his wifes maiden name.

 Linnaeus seems to have led a pretty good life, following the flowers, living the dream, He went plant exploring extensively, he curated a few different botanical gardens in his lifetime, taught botany, founded the royal academy, took a job as a professor of medicine but decided he liked the garden better so made himself the director of the University Botanical Garden finishing his career as the president, publishes the Species plantarum, essentially a monograph of every described plant in the world in the 1750's. Retires and the king makes him a Knight. What a life!

Iris reticulata

The Iris are starting in now, here is a little phenology chart for the last three months in case you are planning a winter show sometime:

December:

Iris planifolia

January:

 Iris aucheri 'indigo' 

February:

Iris reticulata

Iris hyrcana 'Talish'

                                                                           Iris hyrcana 'Talish'

Linneaus realized that people couldn't really understand plants if everyone was speaking a different language. Of course Linnaeus named the genus Iris for the Greek goddess who carried messages down from Mt. Olympus on a Rainbow. I mean come on, what's not to like about a guy who thought that was a good way to name plants? Creating a language is not something trifle, describing every known plant at the time a pretty big task, but calling the Iris an Iris, well that's just brilliant. 

Language is so important because as I've come to observe, the digital age has made us all really bad at communication. In this day of emails, texts, awkward pauses and interruptions on teams and zoom and emojis, it can be hard to pick up what inflection someone is trying to get across. For someone who relishes his hands in the dirt, his head in the sun, and whose best times have been spent pulling weeds in many a fine garden, spending this past year behind a computer screen trying to learn a whole new digital language, in a pandemic, navigating the "empty nest", and generally trying to fumble my way through a remote office culture. It has made me realize that life is really pretty short and chasing dreams is something that we should never give up. I read about people like Linnaeus who kept moving through life to get to where they found happiness. If you don't like being a professor of medicine, go be a director of the botanical garden! That should be life's mantra. Clearly he was smart enough to do either, and driven enough to make it happen. You can tell from the quote penned at the beginning it probably didn't come easy, but then again nothing great ever does. I like that there is some humility there. You don't become the inventor of a language and the father of taxonomy overnight. In reading some of his biography, the guy never stopped moving. It's too easy to throw out quotes but the best one here is the rolling stone gathers no moss.

Well I'm off to chase some rainbows as it looks like the bulk of the Juno section is trying to get above ground now. Despite what the groundhog said it's definitely Spring in the illahe, strap in for some fast and furious blogging because the flowers have returned. 

Dense fog and 34 this morning but the afternoon promises sunshine should it burn off. 

Cheers, 

Mark

Dogwood Summer?

"Wildflowers can’t be controlled, and neither can the girl with a soul boundless as the sky, and a spirit as free and wild as the ocean"

Melody Lee

Sacajawea, the daughter of a Lemhi Soshone chief was only 12 years old when she was captured by a Hidatsa raiding party and sold as a slave to the French canadian trapper Toussaint Charboneau, who married her and subsequently was hired by the Lewis and Clark expedition to translate on the overland Journey. One can only imagine the fortitude of such a woman who gave birth to a son on that journey with it's trials and tribulations while carrying an infant. The reports of her death are sketchy but it seems to have been pieced together that she died in 1812 at Fort Mandan, near the mouth of the Bighorn River in Montana. But native oral stories say she left Charboneau and returened to her Shoshone people in Wyoming and died in 1884. She left us a piece de resistance of feminine power in a time when women were really treated as chattle, she saved the expedition many a time, the west is covered with place names bearing her mark and this lovely variegated form of Camas leichtlinii with it's creamy flowers. 

Camas leichtlinii 'Sacajawea'

I have this wall calendar with a bunch of folklore from the farmers almanac hanging in the kitchen, near the toaster oven. Last month's entry talked about the dogwood winter, must be mostly an eastern thing as I have seen a lot of references to the Tennessee mountains regarding this phenomenon. The legends say that the dogwood winter is when the Cornus start blooming and northern cold fronts push in to give the little winters in the middle of spring. I've never heard it referenced here in Oregon where the lovely Cornus nutallii dots the woods. I think we are experiencing the opposite of a dogwood winter this season. The dogwood summer came on about 3 weeks ago when we hit 80 degrees in April. Normally, you can count on April to produce pretty much non stop rain showers, broken only by the occasional gale and often a downpour to mix it up. If we are really lucky a day might start with drizzle, a few sunbreaks will find shorts and sun dresses on the streets only for the day to end with a thunderstorm and a half inch of rain. Not this year. This spring has been crazy dry, when it stopped raining three weeks ago I thought, this is a nice little break from the usual April dreary grey skies, but then the warmth pushed a lot of the spring bulbs over way to fast and pretty soon the clay soil for which the valley is so famous was starting to crack from the lack of moisture. 

I don't know what a Dogwood Summer heralds for the rest of the growing season, but I sure hope it doesn't mean an inferno of a summer. 

The Camas collection is starting to bloom, as are many of the May wildflowers of the Willamette valley. 

William Conklin Cusick is a name that should be familiar to anyone who studies the flora of Oregon. A self taught botanist in the likes of Howell and Suskdorf. He was assigned to monitor the activities of the Nez Peirce tribe in Idaho as a volunteer of the union army during the Civil War. The Nez Peirce were peaceful and this left Cusick plenty of time to botanize in the hills around Fort Lapwai. Following the war he spent time in Sisters, Oregon and Salem, before finally establishing a homestead in the Thief Valley, near the Powder River of Eastern Oregon. Asa Gray got him into the real deal of botanical collection and he was soon making expeditions into the Cornucopia area of the Wallowa Mountains, from which the form of his namesake Camas was likely seen.  One of the interesting pieces of his story that jumped out to me was he married a widow with 8 children later in life, he supported two of the boys as they attended the Oregon Agricultural College (later to become my alma mater Oregon State University). Both of the boys dropped out of college to get married. I wonder how dissapointed he was at that? 

The indomitable Camas cusickii from a seed collection many years ago in Oregon's Wallowa mountains just seems to get better with age. 

This stately variegated form is gracing the rock garden, the Hebe cupressoides 'Boughton Dome' propagated from Jane McGary's lendary Estacada rock garden makes a nice backdrop of the creamy variegated spears of foliage.

Camas leichtlinii in the wildflower meadow at Illahe

Lupines and Hawthornes as the Wildflower bloom commences.

Nelsons Checkermallow in the Wildflower meadow at Illahe

A few of the wildlfowers are starting in and the season does seem early, with all the warm weather we have had. I really need the rain back to soak the ground for some planting in the vegetable garden. Normally I don't have to put up any summer irrigation until well into June. But this year the ground is so dry it's looking like watering will need to start early. 

 

Iris douglasiana in the flower border

Iris 'pacific coast hybrid'
This one of the forms from the Berry Botanic Garden that had a nice swarm of Pacific coast hybrids that flowed down a slope under an immense Douglas fir, I've been meaning to propagate this one as it's tucked under some plum trees in the Southern hedgerow and lost to the world for the most part. 

No Rain in the 10 day forecast that I can see.......boy I sure hope this Dogwood Summer doesn't last. 

Mark

Iris in January

 "The offspring of riches: Pride, Vanity, Ostentation, Arrogance, Tyranny" 

                                                        Mark Twain

Who does that sound like it's describing? To be perfectly clear on the subject, I wanted him hung for trying to destroy the postal service, I think he should have faced a firing squad for separating families at the border, I would have been perfectly ok if they gave him the gas chamber for playing god with all of our lives and denying climate change, or putting Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA. I think we would have been wholly justified in giving him the louisette for his treason against this country with regards to Russia and the way he bent over for Putin anytime he was asked. I think the we could all have enjoyed seeing him drawn and quartered in the streets for the over 3,000 conflicts of interest he used to profit himself and his family, personally destroying the integrity of his post and flagrantly stealing from what is ours as Americans. 

But now, in reality he did himself far worse then those things. Any of those options for death would be an easy way out for number 45. The day a confederate flag was hoisted inside the capital by a murderous mob of white supremicists was the day that his legacy was forever written as it should be told, a vain, rasisct, full of arrogance and wanting to impost tyranny on a land where that will not be tolerated. It speaks a warning of what does lie buried in the soul of this country. Hidden behind it's false evangelical puritanism, the veins of hatred run deep. He will end his days in a federal prison, or even more justice would be dealt if they turn him loose without the secret service protection, his empire crumbling, the vast hotels he built, converted to low income housing, or as a starter housing to the American dream for the immigrants seeking the beacon light of the world. His Golf courses turned into free tent camping for the millions of homeless that his incompetence created.  I hope he lives long enough to see that his empire gets not reduced to ashes but used to build prosperity and a future for all the people that he tried so hard to destroy.  

I look forward to once again not having to think constantly about what peril we will be put in because of tyrannical and fascist leadership. I look forward to once again being able to focus on flowers and the beauty in this world instead of having to look everyday at the pure ugliness and hatred that has been pretending to lead these last four years. 

Happy to see the flowers of winter starting in

Iris hyrcana 'Talish'

I really am looking forward to getting back to the flowers, the heaviness of the past four years have occupied too much of my heart and the tyrant and buffoon stole too much of my energy and time. The flowers are starting and a new spring is coming. A new spring that promises growth and rebuilding, I know we have a long ways to go to get back to being the beacon of hope in the world but we will achieve it and we will smother out every last bit of that hatred that has been breeding these past four years. 

It's rained something close to 6" since this month started. It has been a while since I've seen that much water in a relatively short time. The poor old farmhouse at illahe that has been sinking into the soft, fertile jory soil for 100 years now has a lake underneath it and I had to open the crawl space vents to let the deluge out. The high water table seems to have pushed  the voles out of the tunnels and I've been dealing with some serious critter issues in the bulb house as the crocus have been mowed down to soil level. 

I have some big plans and ambitions for this year, I hope to get that other greenhouse I've been talking about for so long built. I'm working on a project to capture the flower collection via UV flourescence photography. I've got some raised beds to rebuild and renovations to do on the nursery. I'm looking forward to a return to positive, happy times where growth can occur. Stay tuned for a blog that once again is full of bright flowers and hope. 

Mark

The May Garden

“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em.”

― Shel Silverstein

These days are just packed, despite having no resturants, movie theaters or bars to visit, the boat launches mostly closed so I can't go fishing. I somehow have managed to fill about every minute of every day with something to keep me busy. Lot's of work in the garden lately, as I'm doing an extra big vegetable garden planting this year. I had noticed over the past few years it had gotten progressively smaller and smaller until it seemed to balance out the needs of the two individuals that live at illahe most of the time. But this seems like a time to have a good supply of food on hand so the planting season has been a busy one. There are flowers as well, and I finally managed a quick walk around the garden and greenhouse with the camera on a lazy sunday afternoon that alternated between sun breaks and thunderstorns. 

The Calochortus season has begun

The Rock garden has really been a lovely respite through the "social distancing days"

Allium unifolium 'Wayne Roderick' and Cammassia cusickii in the fading light.

Calochortus luteus

Townsendia's have always delighted me, I grew some in pots plunged in a sand bed this year. I really wish I had more time to do the alpines I love justice. 

The last of the Fritillaria to bloom out in the raised beds, F. biflora grayana

The Calochortus are like paintings, lovely paintings done in natures hues.

Cypella, I've been doing more subtropicals on the patio during the summer and overwintering them in an unheated shop or the greenhouse, and this one is a fun long season bloomer. 

The iris collection is expanding every year. I think the Dutch call this 'Eye of Tiger'

I have sworn that I finally identified this Iris that was growing neglected in a corner of the yard at our first house on Tolman St. in Portland as Iris ensata 'great white heron'. But the foliage is more like a bearded then a Japanese. Whatever it is I have propagated thousands of them and put them everywhere for the lovely fragrant hankerchief sized flowers. 

Iris douglasiana one of our wonderful native species that grows so well with so little care.

Looks to be a wet week ahead, as soggy sneakers were to be had after a morning walk to check the greenhouse. Good for the plants though as I don't really like to start irrigating anything if I don't have to until well into June.

Cheers,

Mark

Bloggeroid test

This is a test of the phone for blogging, hope it works because it will get me out in the greenhouse more and away from the computer.