Western Spring Beauty (Claytonia lanceolata)
Cone Peak Trail, Willamette National Forest, OR, 6/2017.
Spring Beauties are part of a group of plants sometimes called “spring ephemerals”, also including Blue-Eyed Grass, that harness the insulating properties of winter snowfall to send a shoot up from their underground bulb through the cold wet soil, during winter (more…)
Steer’s Head (Dicentra uniflora)
Crescent Mountain Trail, Willamette National Forest, OR, 6/2017.
To find these unique and delicate members of the bleeding heart family, you have to be looking for them. (more…)
Violet Suksdorfia (Suksdorfia violacea)
Castle Rock Trail, Tumwater Canyon, WA. 5/2017
Ran across this single specimen of an uncommon late-spring flower we’d spent days looking for in the Columbia Gorge, (more…)
Tweedy’s Lewisia (Lewisia tweedyi)
Chiwaukum Creek Trail, Wenatchee NF, WA, 5/2017.
The largest member of the Lewisia family grows at low and mid-elevations almost exclusively in the Wenatchee Mountains in central Washington. Frank Tweedy, a botanist with the US Geological Survey stumbled upon this beauty while working with the Northern Pacific Railway in 1882. (more…)
