Pink fairy skirts

"Shrubs are woody plants less than 10 m tall when mature ..." So says my guide, Plants of Coastal British Columbia, in the section, "Shrubs and Small Trees."

Here I find our common salal, huckle-, thimble-, and salmon-berries, honeysuckle, Oregon grape, elderberries (clocking in at 6 m. tall); most of our understory plants. And twinflowers.

Twinflower, Linnaea borealis

Quoting the guide again: "Trailing, slender, semi-woody, evergreen, short (less than 10 cm tall ...) These were less than half that; 2 inches tall at the most, with the leaves down in the moss. The flowers are 2-5 mm long; 1/8 to 1/4 inch.

But the runners are long, which makes them eligible, I guess, for inclusion alongside the rhododendrons and devil's club.

The flowers look like miniature dolls with pink skirts.

These ones are growing all along the upper trail at Elk Falls. I noticed them only because I was walking slowly, with gravel stuck in my sandals. At a normal pace, getting from here (the parking lot) to there, (the important stuff, the bridge and the Falls) I would have missed them entirely.

Wild and tame

In a friend's backyard.

Plastic goldfish pond (sans goldfish), mushroom and native companions.

Oh-so-red berries. Pyracantha, I think. Not a native species.

Pink, fading to brown

Hardhack is one of my favourite shrubs. It grows profusely along streambanks, in soggy soil, on dripping hillsides, forming dense thickets up to 2 metres tall, crowned in season, with showy pink flower spikes. When picked at the height of bloom, these flowers fade to a dusty rose, and last all winter in a dry vase. With pearly everlasting, they make a beautiful winter bouquet.

Spent blooms, left in place, dry to a warm brown, and last all winter on the plant. The leaves drop, leaving wiry stems and the brown heads.

This year has been too hot and dry for most of the hardhack thickets; I saw very few pink blooms, although they must have flowered, passing quickly from bloom to brown seed head.

I picked two flowering heads that I found within reach; they're well past their sell-by date, and dried to brown seeds overnight.

Hardhack is well named: the much-branched, wiry stems form dense tangles that are almost impossible to break through without proper tools. A wall of salal and hardhack, a common combination in our forests, is as effective a barrier as a brick wall with glass on top.

Along a country road

The inhabited area of Campbell River is a long, narrow strip along the shore. Turn inland on any road, and you either come to a quick dead end, or after a few blocks of housing, wild country. Long roads wind off into the forest, sometimes passing a cluster of homesteads, sometimes just petering out into narrow, rutted lanes. On the map, they often have no name, and seem to lead to nowhere in particular, although they may meander halfway across the island.

Along one of these, I stopped to walk in the sunshine. When I stepped out of the car, I was immediately aware of scents; baking wood, a perfume reminiscent of pineapple weed, the tangy aroma of pine, dry grass. Birds chattered and piped in the bushes, unseen. Far in the distance I could hear the rattle of a helicopter; other than that, there was no sign of other humans.

Nobody's been along here for a while.

A wider section of road, with oceanspray, Holodiscus discolor.

Flower cluster, with ant. The flowers turn brown and stay on the shrub over winter.

Insect gall on ground-level plant, unidentified.

Great mullein, Verbascum thapsus. The flowers are yellow, but few were out yet. The leaves feel like fine suede.

Thistle. Bull thistle, Cirisium vulgare, I think. Those spines are wicked!

Zooming in. Branch with unidentified beetles. Or bugs.

Distressed beaked stump-critter. In thicket of bracken, fireweed, native blackberry, salal and thimbleberry.

I picked a cluster of vanilla leaf to take home. It's drying now beside my door; I can find it by the scent, even with the lights off.

Vanilla leaf, Achlys triphylla.

Fresh leaves have little or no fragrance, but if left hanging from a nail or drying in a basket, before long their sweet odour will lightly drift though the room. Even a scant three or four leaves can perfume an entire room for several weeks. (From BCLiving)

They say the scent repels mosquitoes, too.

On shrubs and subs

In the cities, we plant floral borders to our walkways. Alongside our human paths in the deep forests, where we've cleared away the duff and rotting branches, the borders plant themselves. Seen this trip; lichens and mosses, wild strawberries and the tiny native trailing blackberry, vanilla leaf and wild columbine. And the tiny twinflowers and tidy bunchberries.

Twinflower, Linnaea borealis

These little flowers stand less than 4 inches tall. I went through my guide to wildflowers twice, page by page, from lilies to broomrape; the twinflowers weren't there. I checked the index, which I should have done first, but never do, and there they were, among the shrubs.

I always think of shrubs as being larger plants, smaller than trees, but at least knee-high. And the twinflower doesn't look shrub-like. But a shrub is defined as a woody plant, usually multi-stemmed, usually under 20 ft. tall. No lower limit.

The twinflower has woody stems, but they trail along the ground, sending the short flower stalks up into the light above. Each stalk ends in a Y, and bears two bell-like flowers. Look at the photo above; a half-dozen or so "clappers" dangle below their "bells". The leaves are evergreen, to match the forest above.

Bunchberry, Cornus canadensis, aka Dwarf dogwood. With twinflower for size comparison.

If the twinflower is a shrub, why isn't the bunchberry? It has trailing, somewhat woody stems, is in the same genus as the Pacific dogwood, a tree, and the red-osier dogwood, another shrub. Maybe it's that the stems are only somewhat woody. Wikipedia calls it a subshrub.

The actual flowers are small, greenish yellow, with purplish centres; four bluish white bracts at the centre of the leaf whorl upstage them, at least to our eyes. The bees aren't fooled.

The leaves are semi-evergreen, and the fruit is a red berry, edible, they say. I haven't tried them. Yet.

As good as a rest

Coming home this afternoon, we were tired and footsore, but the colours were so tempting in the first nursery we passed, that we had to stop and walk all around the tables of bedding plants and the big yard full of trees and shrubs.

Statue in the shade, and Laurie in the background, blending in.

Basket stuffers

Almost green dogwood

Pink stripy dogwood

Lilac buds

White lilac

And red, red maple

Water droplet on hosta leaves

And on the hosta next to this one, I found a spider:

Long-jawed orb weaver. A common enough spider here in BC, but I'd never seen one. She was hanging in her web with the legs close together, underside out, so she looked more like a dried pine needle than an animal. If you look closely at the web, you can see bright dots of glue at the junctions.

When I shook the leaf, she dropped to the edge. At least I got a side view. Her head, compared to the abdomen, is quite short, and half of the apparent length is taken up by huge "jaws", actually the chelicerae. The male's would be bigger still. 

 "... The better to eat you with, my dear," said the wolf.