July 9, 1964
Ninety miles roundtrip seems like a long distance to travel in order to take a color picture of a certain wildflower, and the performance may seem to justify my being facetiously labeled as a nut by a certain Cave Junction wild canurican (not found in Webster: a flexible and handy term handed down to me by my wild canurican dad and my w.c. grandfather, especially applicable to explosively energetic wingless birds who never-the-less insist on flying in the face of any and all odds in order to keep this wobbly old world rocking and rolling to the desired rhythm).
In self-defense, and in order to get you on my side, I want to explain that the flower in question is the only one of its kind in the United States and is found only on the Pacific Slope. It is the wild western peony, Paeonia brownie, which I described in Winding Trails last August. At that time, when I found it growing in Perk’s Pasture, a green and secluded natural meadow nestled among the rugged mountains in the neighborhood of Dutchman Peak and Mt. Ashland, the peony was past blooming; but I succeeded in collecting some seed, and now I have six infant wild peonies growing in an old iron pot on my cabin porch.
Some time ago I was notified by a kindly collaborating forest worker, Mr. von Stein, who mans the Dutchman Peak lookout in the summer and opens winter-fouled trails in the spring in that end of the Siskiyous, that the early-flowering Perk’s Pasture peonies were in full bloom. Last week I jeeped over and found some of them still blooming, although with snow still in the mountains all around, some had already gone to seed. As soon as the melting snow allows the spring sunshine to reach the ground the impatient peony bursts into joyous bloom, but, like the miniature steer’s head bleeding heart of Poker Flat, its flowering life is a very short one. However, the peony persists in bloom, luckily, long enough for the road to Perk’s Pasture to become clear for traveling; while the tiny bleeding heart lives out its short flowering life, blooms and matures and all but withers into invisibility while still protected by miles of snow-covered ground in the hills all around. Our bright yellow glacier lily, too, blooms almost immediately after the snow cover melts, but continues in bloom for some time thereafter, giving us hill-wandering wildflower fans a longer while to enjoy its fresh loveliness. Glacier lily, except for its coloring, resembles our more common fawn-lilies, or lamb’s tongue, of the Valley, all belonging to the same genus.
Beside the Dutchman road I found an exciting new plant for my wildplant list – the alpine dwarf waterleaf, a showy low member of the Phacelia family. It is only five or six inches high, with thickish, divided basal leaves and small bright blue flowers in spherical heads nearly an inch in diameter, on short thick central stems only three or four inches high.
After this lucky find, and my peony picture-taking, what could be more appropriate by way of celebration after coming down out of the high hills, with eight tiring hours behind me, than to stop in at the little out-back restaurant near McKee’s bridge, on the Applegate and enjoy a piece of delicious home-made boysenberry pie smothered in ice cream, and a nice big mug of steaming hot coffee?
