Pacific Coast Rhododendrons in Bloom

The rhododendrons are in bloom in the Pacific Northwest, a soothing tonic for this rumpled lady. I’ve been ill, which has resulted in a few unintended benefits for us Arboreality.

The fenced vegetable garden on the south side of the house went untouched this month as I prepared for a trip which I was unable to take. While ill, I spent a lot of time looking out windows, a wonderful low-impact activity. That’s when I noticed a particular pair of birds which seemed to spend all of their time in the garden, at the exclusion of any other birds.

The result? My garden neglect was two junco birds’ paradise. In the quiet protection of the vegetable garden, nestled in the comfort of strawberries and thyme, a pair of juncos reared two chicks.

This afternoon I’m writing up my notes and photos to share for the Festival of the Trees 48, to be hosted by Casey Harn at the Wandering Owl Outside blog.

With three days left to submit, there’s still plenty of time to blog about trees and participate! Here are the details so you can join the fun:

Host: Wandering Owl Outside

Deadline: May 30

Email to: cjharn [at] gmail [dot] com — or use the contact form

Themes: The relationship between trees and game animals/birds, or any environmental benefits of trees

Important! Put “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line of your email

Also be sure to stop by Nature’s Whispers to enjoy the May Day Festival of the Trees 47 hosted generously by Jasmine.

Festival of the Trees Interview at The Nature Blog Network

Stop by The Nature Blog Network for an interview discussing The Festival of the Trees blog carnival with Pablo, Dave Bonta, and me. Learn about how The Festival of the Trees got its start, and how you can participate in future issues.

Many thanks to our interviewer Wren and the rest of the team at The Nature Blog Network for inviting us to share our passion, and for helping to share the community of nature bloggers with the world wide web.

To read past issues, volunteer to host, and learn more about The Festival of the Trees, we invite you to visit The Festival of the Trees coordinating blog.

Learn more about Wren's work at her blog Wrenaissance Reflections.

Sunrise Rhododendron

The Art of Looking (and Wandering)

It’s taken me some time to find my groove now that I’m back in the Pacific Northwest. Wandering through the forest helps me to remember the useful arts of looking, listening, and waiting. Inspiration, clarity, and understanding require a fair portion of patience and “receptiveness” to the unexpected.

The next time you have a chance to stroll through a park, garden, or forest, remember to slow your pace a bit and look, or listen, or simply breathe. If you cannot seem to find anything new, try a change of perspective: crane your neck upwards, squat down on your heels, lay on your belly, or simply turn around and look back on the path you’ve just traveled.

Personal Encounters with the Pacific Rhododendron

Every chance I find, I wander into my backyard woods in Kitsap to reconnect with my many floral friends. The Pacific Rhododendron (also known as the Coast or Coastal Rhododendron) is one of my favorites.

Wild rhododendrons have many moods. In the spring Pacific Rhododendrons cautiously extend new leaves and fresh flowers, blossoming in May or June. The brightness of clear-cuts keep rhododendrons squat and bushy, but in the shade of the forest they reach long, elegant arms in search of light.

The late heat of the summer will cause the lowest leaves to droop and yellow in time for autumn rains. Finally, a steady, cold winter freeze will motivate the rhodies to pull their leaves low to the trunk as the snow slides off.

I struggled to choose which images to share today, and finally settled for three of the more personal, close encounters I captured on a recent walk. Here you see fresh, young leaves not yet dark and leathery, as well as the final throws of spring blossoms hiding under the shade of Red Cedars and Western Hemlocks.

Arboreality will be featuring more from the evergreen forests in coming months. We're going to take a meditative tack for a while.

Neighbors

To conclude our investigation into the Pacific Rhododendron, I’d like to show you two of our subject rhododendron’s favorite neighbors, and dear friends of my own.

Meet Salal, and “Mystery-Bush” – two shrubby evergreens that grow happily along side the rhododendrons in my back yard in Seabeck. These two can be found in many other places around the Pacific Northwest.

The salal is the plant with the large round-ish leaves. Like the rhododendron, salal is a member of the family Ericaceae.

Unlike the parking-lot variety which are small and close to the ground, the salal growing in the forest interior have to reach high to stake their light claims, and most are over a meter tall. Others grow up to five meters high, often leaning on their neighbors for extra support.

As to “mystery-bush”… here is my quandary: I believe that it is a type of common huckleberry, also of the family Ericaceae, but I haven’t been able to confirm that. Another alternative would be that it is a shrub called boxwood (part of a different family, I believe). I am simply at a loss. Maybe they are one and the same, and it's merely a question of local word choice?

Whatever it is, this lovely plant produces swaths of tiny, pink fragrant blossoms which are followed by huge clumps of juicy, sweet, blue, violet, and black berries. Not only do the small birds and the bumble bees LOVE these plants, but apparently huskies do too!

Both of the husky dogs that have lived with me have enjoyed many an hour sitting beside these bushes, shucking the berries off like so much corn! Once they’ve finished with one bush, they move to the next one. The evidence of their efficient and voracious harvesting method is shown in the undigested leaves adorning each healthy poopy in the morning.

As a side note, we also have another huckleberry that grows around the forest which produces tiny, tart, red berries. As much as I might miss all my forest friends of Western Washington, I am so incredibly excited for my opportunity to meet all the plants of the East Coast!

Up close and personal... with mosses and lichens!

While examining the rhododendron as a whole, I also took some time to investigate the rhododendron’s partners and neighbors. Today we’re looking at some of the mosses and lichens growing on and around our subject rhododendron.

Sadly, I never had the chance to research each one and learn their names and attributes… so all you moss and lichen buffs out there, speak up!

The most exciting thing for me about studying this part of the rhododendron’s life, is to observe the ways that these mosses and lichens behave in different weather conditions. Here you see them on the day before a rain. They are beautiful, but dry. On the following day when the rains saturate their bodies, each moss seems to grow to twice its size, and reach out into the air with a just-audible sigh of contented “ahhhhhhhh!”

Remember to click on images for more detail.

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Spent

After blooming, the rhododendron flowers do like most flowers do, and produce seeds for the next generation.

Here is an image of our subject rhododendron, in which you see some spent seed pods from the previous years’ flower buds.

[Scroll down a little to yesterday's post for images of the beautiful rhododendron flowers].

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Flowers for the flustered

I needed a flower today… so here you have them.

These are images of the beautiful splendor that is the native Pacific Coastal Rhododendron in bloom. Blooming for wild rhodies in the Pacific Northwest typically occurs in May. Rhodies in the forest interior will take their own sweet time, however.

It was mid-winter when I was conducting my study of the rhododendron we’ve been talking about. Consequently, the pictures here are of another rhododendron… one with its own story.

One day, I was wandering the backyard when I came across a chunk of rotting wood about a foot long with a bend in it like my elbow. Springing from this wood was a tiny rhododendron seedling. Excitedly, I scraped back the earth with one hand while cradling the wood with the other right next to the fencing you see in the pictures. I placed the wood in the earth with the rhodie seedling sticking up, and left it to go about its business.

The rhododendron happily sprang forth, and the pictures you see here are taken in its second year when it bloomed for the first time. Talk about a healthy first bloom! Incidentally, these are the images I used as templates for my sketches of the rhododendron on my design for the Washington State Quarter.

Be sure to click on these pictures for maximum enjoyment. Better yet, come visit Kitsap County in late May – you won’t be disappointed!

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Rhododendron trunk detail

In this picture we see the three “primary” trunks associated with the subject-rhododendron. Along side the three primary trunks is the newest member – the young fledgling you see just to the left which stands only a few feet tall.

If I were to remove some of the duff from around the base of the trunks, I suspect I would see that these trunks in fact connect directly to other nearby rhododendrons on either side of the trail.

However, I had no intention of disturbing my green friend… so it remains a theory.

Remember you can click on images to enlarge for more detail!

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More rhododendrons

This is one of my favorite images that came out of my rhododendron tree research project. Don’t you just adore that voluptuous rain drop hanging on the lip of the leathery leaf? Mmm... I smell rain!

The rhodie in this picture is in fact different from the one I was studying. I pass it on the trail while on my way to the subject-rhododendron. The particular morning of this picture followed a nice night-long rain.

For all I know, the rhododendrons in the forest are all just pieces of one another… it’s difficult to determine where one rhodie ends and the other begins when you look at their growth habits and root systems.

Inside the forest, rhododendrons often appear to reproduce vegetatively (using existing parts to create new plants), as opposed to clear cuts where you can see distinctive baby “saplings” springing up separately, obviously from seed-starts.

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Pacific rhododendrons of the forest interior

The native Pacific rhododendron (Rhododendron macrophyllum) which grows around Western Washington and other parts of the Pacific Northwest are truly among my favorite “trees.”

When rhododendrons grow with other pioneering tree species in clear cuts, they are squat and bushy. However, in the interior of the forest, where there is ongoing competition for light, the rhododendrons grow into elegant, leggy creatures extending branches in all directions.

The rhododendron with whom I spent much of my time for this project is one such example. My best estimate (using a dead alder skeleton as a guide), is that her highest branches extend some 6.096 meters high. Her arms reach in all directions, bunching up where the light gaps are most generous.

In this image, you see what it looks like to stand at the base of the primary trunks and look up through the rhododendron branches. Whenever I look at this picture I am overwhelmed by the smell of rain on her smooth leaves, the sweet duff covering her roots, and the crisp hemlocks which keep her company.

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