The Turning of the Year

Day 344: It is the turning of the year. Seemingly overnight, the vine maples have gone from quietly suggesting colour to wearing it with flamboyance, hushing the voices of our thousand shades of green with their bold fashion statement. To my way of thinking, autumn in the Pacific Northwest eclipses that of the East where colour is everywhere. Our reds and golds are polka-dots on a fabric of evergreen, shock value in their propensity for showing off. "You think you're something, Doug-fir? Here. Hold my beer!" While the remainder of the deciduous crowd sits on the sidelines in shades of dingy gold and brown, vine maples do their stuff to the awe of the audience. Their only competition for Best of Show is the bright yellow of the tamaracks, but they're in another bar, over the mountains and down the other side. This, I predict, will be an Orange Year. Orange Years are the standard, and delight western Washington leaf-peepers. Red Years are to be treasured, few and far between, coming only when some mysterious combination of temperature and humidity allows. Brown Years, the sad and sorry years, are fairly rare, when the vine maples close up shop early, as if to say, "That's it. Done with this. I'm outta here. 'Bye!" 

Archway

Day 206: "Arch!" No, I'm not in the holodeck on the Enterprise NCC-1701D. I'm in Pack Forest, and I'm ducking under an arch of Vine Maple (Acer circinatum), one of many which curve over the trails. This small-leaved species is common in Pacific Northwest lowland forests, and is more of a shrub than a tree, although a very leggy one. Its branches are very bendy when fresh, and were used by native peoples to make baskets similar to those made with willow withies. When it arches like the example in the photo, it may self-layer where the tip touches the ground to form a new cluster of trunks still connected to the parent tree. Like other maples, it produces samaras, winged "helicopter" seeds which animals and birds both enjoy. Its hardwood trunks seldom attain a diameter of more than a few inches, although roots may be larger. In fact, I have a lathe-turned vase of Vine Maple made by a former neighbour which is 8" tall and 4" in diameter.

Socktober

Day 353: It...Sock...Tober. The first snow dusted Elbe Hills last week, and if I'd gone out an hour earlier this morning, I might have found a few patches of frost in the colder parts of the yard. The cucumber vine blackened, having given me precisely one cucumber, and the leaves on the mulberry (ever fruitless) are beginning to look rather limp. While the garden is in its throes, the vine maples are celebrating. Although I can't quite label this a "Red Year," they're coming close. Multiple conditions determine whether Acer circinatum turns red, orange or yellow, or whether it goes straight to brown, and the formula is too complex for mere humans to figure out. I'd call this year "mahogany." There's enough red in it to satisfy any leaf-peeper's soul even though it's not as fiery as it sometimes is. But it is definitely Socktober. My toes can attest to that.

Autumn Wow

Day 345: A sure sign of Autumn's incursion, the vine maples are beginning to redden, and one of the best local displays is guaranteed to catch the eye of any hiker on the Park's Westside Road. At the base of Mount Wow's rugged slopes between Dry Creek and Fish Creek, the talus fields are covered with this native shrub. If you're thinking you'd say "Wow!" if you were standing here looking almost straight up, you'd be right in doing so, but wrong if you thought that was how the 5921' peak got its name. As the story goes, "wow" is a transliteration of a word from an indigenous language meaning "mountain goat," and indeed, the goats can often be seen precariously perched on the narrow ledges above the road. But there's one old goat who never made the summit of the massif, and probably never will. That's not to say I didn't make the attempt a few times, but never found a route which was not obstructed by dense vegetation or insurmountable cliffs. Still, were you standing here beside me, you might hear me say, "Wow!" I might be referring to the scarps above, or it might just mean I've spotted a sure-footed goat who has boldly gone where no Crow has gone before.

Fall Colour, PNW Style

Day 5: While the Pacific Northwest can't compete with the showy colours autumn brings to the eastern part of the US, we do have our specialties, one of which is Vine Maple (Acer circinatum). This species of small-leaved maple is rather variable in its response to climate conditions, and its displays appear to be affected by some magical formula which includes temperature, water availability, number of cloudy days and perhaps whether or not the full moon occurred on a Tuesday in July. Whatever it is, I have not been able to deduce the complex sequence of events which sometimes results in a "Red Year" as opposed to a brown one. Red Years can be spectacular. The present season is less than optimum, although this view, directly behind my mailbox, lights up even the darkest days of grey October gloom.

Botanical Art

Day 10: I'm not kidding myself. I know that I don't have an artistic bone in my body. I couldn't draw a square square if you paid me, and to try to get the proportions and perspective right on something as simple as an egg is as far beyond my skill as trying to recreate the work of one of the Old Masters. However, I do think I have a good eye for colour, which is probably the product of years of doing needlework. I never need to carry a fabric sample to the store to match thread. I simply commit it to memory before I go shopping. Lack of artistic talent aside, I have long desired to be able to do botanical illustrations in some medium or another, so when a friend began taking watercolour classes, I thought I'd give it a try. I bought a cheapo kit: several brushes, some paints in tubes and some in "tablet" form. The tubes struck me as likely to waste a lot of paint, so I haven't cracked them yet, but I seem to be doing okay with the hard sort. After my first few attempts turned out rather too light (the vine maple, for example), Patty advised me to allow the paint to dry and then add a second layer to make the colour stronger. While I don't think I'm there yet, I'm not unhappy with the results either. That said, I have to admit to a certain cheat: I know I can't draw, so I traced around real leaves and then laid in the colour. Hey, at least I stay within the lines.

Leaves

Day 309: Here's a quick lesson in basic botany, presented in the form of a visual quiz. Don't worry, you won't be graded on your response.

We talk about leaves in many ways, throwing around words like "serrulate" and "runcinate" to describe their margins, referring to their tips as "cirrose," "aristate" and so on, "obelliptic" and "flabellate" for their shapes, but in the most elementary terms, leaves can be placed in one of two categories: simple or compound. A simple leaf is just that: it has a central vein and if it is lobed (think of an oak leaf), the most deeply cut portion of the lobes do not reach the central vein. It is generally attached to the main stem of the plant by a petiole (stalk). Please note that I said "generally." Sessile (stalkless) forms do occur. A compound leaf is made up of multiple leaflets arising from a single petiole, and compound leaves can be palmate (shaped like a hand) or pinnate (resembling a feather).

I promised you a quick lesson, so I won't go any further down the rabbit hole than this. From left to right, top row: 1) Golden Chain Tree, 2) Red Alder, 3) Sitka Mountain-ash; bottom row: 4) Vine Maple, 5) Philadelphus, 6) Horse Chestnut. Categorize these six leaves as follows: simple, palmately compound, pinnately compound.

And there. You learned a couple of new words in a relatively painless manner.

Answers: elpmis, evif, ruof, owt; dnuopmoc yletamlap, xis dna eno; dnuopmoc yletannip, eerht.

October Wow

Day 358: Wow! "Mount Wow," that is. The name was derived from a native-language word meaning "mountain goat," and applies to a massif on the western boundary of the Park which is prime goat habitat. Foreshortened here by my proximity to the trees, Mount Wow rises abruptly to 5921' from the Westside Road and has been the source of many damaging rockfalls. The constant scouring of its slopes by rock and avalanche keeps vegetation at a minimum with the exception of dense groves of pioneering vine maple (Acer circinatum). If Mount Wow's towering face wasn't enough to make you say "Wow!" then the maples in a "red year" such as this certainly would.

"Red years" only occur when certain climatological criteria are met, and what those criteria are remains a mystery to me. Prolonged dryness is one factor, but by itself, it is not enough to trigger a red year. Sometimes after a summer drought, I have seen these trees go from sickly yellow directly to dead brown. On other occasions, they transition through a feeble pink without ever achieving their full red potential. Nor is it cyclic, although glorious, full-blown red years occur roughly one in five. This year, the slopes of Mount Wow are aflame with maple fire, a delight for the eyes even in the absence of goats.

Fall Colour

Day 355: I half-expected to see little pockets of frost in the yard when I stepped out onto the back porch and felt the chill in the morning, but if it was there, it eluded my eye. That said, a few things are starting to colour up and seed pods are bursting, ready to be harvested for next year's planting. Autumn is not the end, but rather the beginning of a new gardening season, the time when potential is paramount in the gardener's mind. It is a time of evaluation and planning, identifying what needs lifting, what needs moving, what might go here or there to give shade or to eliminate it. Autumn's advice must be heeded. What worked well? What did not? In pulling out the nasturtiums, I discovered that they had saved my other plants from attack by black aphids. A boon, perhaps? Or in a garden where they had only ever been a problem on marigolds, were they drawn to the nasturtiums, there to breed and lay eggs? Whatever the case, a lesson was learned under Autumn's tutelage. There will be no more nasturtiums for me!

You Know The Drill

Day 41: You know the drill...or do you? Can you identify who's been pecking your trees by looking at the holes? Red-Breasted Sapsucker (frequently misidentified as a "red-headed woodpecker" by novice birders) typically drills horizontal lines of evenly spaced holes as shown in the image on the left. Contrary to common belief, Sphyrapicus ruber can't be blamed for killing trees. These birds are drawn to wood which has already been weakened by other stresses (disease, drought, detrimental bugs). Although the name suggests that these birds might feed exclusively on sap, it has been shown that they often drill holes without feeding, and return later to dine on the insects which are drawn to the exudate. Sapsucker likes his bugs sweetened!