Gone to seed

It's mid-August, and in our short northern summer, the nights are cool again. Leaves are turning yellow and red; below big maples, brown leaves crackle under my feet. In the sunny meadows and along the shoreline, the rush is on to get next year's seeds into the ground.

Some seeds are welcome:

Wild cherries. The birds will love them, and spread the seeds all around the meadow.

That tiny rabbits-foot clover, still good to look at, with tiny orange seeds on each bit of fluff.

Field pennycress, Thlapsi arvense. The flowers are white, but on some of the plants, the seed pods have turned pink.

Two different plants, both unidentified.

Sea rocket, Cakile edentula. Look good enough to eat.

According to Wikipedia, the leaves of sea rocket are edible. Another one to try.

And some seeds are not so pleasant.

Large-headed sedge, Carex macrocephala. Those spines are hard and sharp, enough to scratch an ankle as I walk past.

And this is the worst I've found this year:

Silver burweed, Ambrosia chamissonis, looking innocent.

These are the male flowers. They line up in clusters on the tall stalks. A bit hairy, always speckled with sand because they're slightly sticky and catch anything blowing in the wind, but otherwise attractive enough.

The female flowers are towards the bottom of the spikes, crowded into leaf bracts, and soon crowned with the growing burrs.

Developing seed packets.

The burrs dry, turn brown and hard, and fall to the ground, where they become invisible and where they soon find a passing sandal and dig in. Those spines are sharp! Several times, I jumped and yelped, feeling as if I'd been bitten by something dire, then hopped to a support, took off my sandal, and had to pull the spines out of my skin. They don't just shake off.

Rabbits frequent this area. I've found their droppings everywhere. I wonder how those spines feel on their tender feet.

Still here.

South Slope flowers, Part 2

By the railroad track west of White Rock, there is a small apple tree, sprouted, probably from someone's apple core tossed into the moist soil at the base of the cliff. The apples are quite tasty, if small and somewhat scarred. I brought home a bag last year, and made myself a batch of good applesauce.

I looked for the new flowers last week, but didn't see them. It may be a bit early yet. But its relative, the bitter cherry, was in full bloom nearby.

Prunus emarginata

The fruit trees from the Rose family, apples, crabapples, plums, cherries, and pears, can be very confusing. The flowers are similar; 5 petalled beauties, white or pink, in showy clusters, blooming around the same time, on trees that vary with location and treatment, and that hybridize easily.  Only the Japanese cherries, like the rest but with double and triple flowers, mostly pink and often weeping, are easy to recognize at first glance.

The bitter cherry produces flowers that grow in small open clusters along the branch, which may be red, greyish, or a reddish purple. The leaves are round-tipped and hairy.

Around 5 to 10 flowers per cluster.

The choke cherry that we sometimes see here groups its flowers in long clusters of more than 10 blooms, at the end of the branch. Its cherries will be similar; small, red to black, and too bitter to eat as is, although the bitter cherry is worse, and sometimes called inedible. Some people, though, make jams and jellies with them, using large quantities of sugar.

I have tasted them, directly off the tree. I like strong flavours, but these were too much for me; I had to spit them out.

More flowers. Just because they're pretty.

Zooming in. I saturated the yellows a bit to show the hairs along the stems.

The bark of the bitter cherry is rot-resistant and could be peeled off the trunk in long strips, which BC First Nations people used in tool construction, for wrapping joints. They were also woven as decoration into cedar baskets. Used "au naturel", it was reddish, but it was also darkened to almost black by burying it in swampy ground for up to a year. Here's a sample basket, made by a Salish native in Washington state.