Sun lover

Here in the Pacific rainforest, most of our native plants like wet feet, shade, and plenty of rain. In this dry, hot, too bright summer, many of them are already shedding their leaves, turning brown, looking baked. One, though, loves the light and the heat; fireweed.

Left to right, green seed pods, flowers, buds. As long as the sun shines, fireweed will keep on going.

Fireweed loves logging slash, scraped roadsides, vacant lots, leftover construction debris, and, especially, the blackened remains of last year's forest fires. These were growing along an abandoned gravel track across a wide clearing behind the beaver pond. Background vegetation is mostly red alder and hardhack, both colonizers of recently cleared land.

A pioneer species, Fireweed appears wherever the earth has been scraped, or especially burned, leaving exposed soil and an open canopy letting in lots of light. Its rhizomes can extend to about 45 cm. deep, knitting and holding the soil, preventing erosion while other more slowly growing vegetation can become established. The rhizomes are so tenacious they often survive forest fires.(The Nature of the Hills)

The seeds can lay dormant in the soil for years, and spring into life after a good burn clears away the shade plants. For a few years, the fireweed ties down the soil, and provides shade for the replacement seedlings, the trees and forest shrubs that will form the next rainforest. Once the trees rise above the fireweed, it dies; it doesn't appreciate the shade. But it leaves its seeds behind, (80,000 per plant - Wikipedia) waiting for the next fire.

Delicate flowers. I never realized before that the pollen is pale blue.