Sun Dew

When I was up at Cat Lake a few weeks back I was sitting on a log and noticed some tiny lime green plants with little purple tentacles. Upon closer inspection I recognized these as carnivorous plants. I later looked them up and found out they were Sundews. Pretty amazing little plants that use their sticky tentacles to attract and capture insects. These are actually an indicator specis for BC! A friend of mine recently got an ant infestation in her house and has reportedly used pitcher plants to capture the bugs, pretty nice little pets to have. I am going to try growing some in a terarium I have started.

Alaska blueberry aka blue huckleberry aka black huckleberry

Yesterday I got a great tip to go and find the "black huckleberries" at Camosun Bog. I had never been to Camosun bog but it wasn't too hard to find. it is just off 16th near crown. I biked there from UBC. It's beautiful and they are doing a remediation project there which you can help out with if you have time on Saturday mornings from 9am to noon.
I wasn't exaclty sure what I was looking for, my friend had said that the berries looked like the red huckle berries, but they were dark blue and grew above the leaves rather than hanging below them. Much to my delight, once I got onto the boardwalk they were hard to miss, and upon tasting them I was brought back to my childhood. I remember picking them in the summers when we would rent a cabin at Still Water near Powell River. My mum would get hours of time to herself by asking my brother and I to go and pick enough huckleberries for a pie. Huckleberries, for the unninitiated, are tiny, and I don't know if we ever actually managed to collect a pie's worth, but all the same everybody won.
It has been years since I have seen these and they are delicious! I was pleased to run into other people who were noticing the berries. One grandmother was encouraging her grandson to try the berries, another couple were noticing the berries and thought I was "brave" for trying them but were too skeptical to try them themselves. Made me a bit sad, as this is a trait I have noticed in a lot of people, a sort of poison phobia that seems to extend to all plants or mushrooms not wrapped in plastic and sold by the pound. Le sigh. At any rate the berries are there for the taking and I would encourage everyone to go and have a taste, there are plenty of red huckleberries as well and some salmon berries to boot. When I got home I looked them up and found a great website which had the botanical name and description, turns out they are actually called Alaska Blueberries, but both terms work fine as far as I'm concerned.

Arbutus

Okay, I have been seriously slacking off with the whole plant of the week thing and I apologize. I will do my best to remedy the situation. I went to Saturna Island a couple of weekends ago and took some photos there. Here is one of my favorite trees, an Arbutus. It is native to BC and loves sunny out-croppings. There is a story that once there was a young woman whose lover went off to war in a ship. She waiting for him by the sea but he never returned. The story goes that this is why Arbutus trees are usually found growing near the sea, or at lookout points, eventually that woman turned into a tree. The skin of this tree is quite remarkable., it peels away in rusty brown strips but underneath is a vibrant green. Often times it will have large parts which are dead, while others prosper. It definitely does take on the air of a tortured soul.

licorice fern

This is a lovely Native fern which you can recognize by looking at the underside of the fronds at the yellow circular sori (which are made up of tiny spores). Spores are how ferns reproduce. This kind of reproduction has been around a lot longer than seeds and fruit and all that. Ferns date back from dinosaur times, to put it in 10 year-old speak, which is what I like to do these days. It is a smallish fern, and you can often see them growing as epiphytes (an organism that grows upon or attaches to a living plant) on big evergreen trees (especially big leaf maples). There are 3 varieties of this plant, and one, the Western polypody has a rhizome (horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground) which tastes like licorice. If the rhizome is white, you have the wrong one, if it tastes bitter, you have the wrong one, but if it is sweet and licoricy then you have a winner! These little sweeties have been chewed by the Squamish, Sechelt, Comox, Nuxalk, Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw people of this area and were considered an important medicine for colds and sore throats as well as a useful sweetener to be mixed with botter medicines.

Coastal Western Hemlock

Obviously I am not cut out for daily blogging. I am going to instead suggest a less ambitious goal of one or more plants (and some animals) a week. That seems manageable.

The other day my friend Sophie told me a story about the coastal western hemlock tree. It came up today as I had science and during my 4 hour class (ugh) the prof took us out to look at some plants, literally we only looked at 2 trees. One of these was the coastal western hemlock. I retold Sophie's story to those around me, it goes something like this:

Long ago the creator was creating. The trees were told to line up in order to receive their cones. The first trees in the line got the biggest cones. Feeling sneaky, Hemlock decided to jump the line as it wanted to have the biggest cones. The creator saw Hemlock and demanded that it move to the back of the line. Hemlock had to wait and wait and when it finally got to the front of the line only small cones were left, which is why hemlock has small cones and hangs it's head in shame.

The other tree we looked at was a yellow cedar, which the teacher said was "close enough" to the red cedar which he claimed was the dominant tree species of the area. Being a plant nerd and a bit of a stickler I tried to correct him but he shot down my suggestion that in fact, coastal western hemlock was the dominant species for this area, and that it was my understanding that red cedar liked wetter areas. To his credit, I worded this awkwardly. I later proved him wrong by looking it up online and he finally accepted defeat. A small, petty, yet satisfying victory for me.