This trip took place on Saturday, July 11, with 7 other members of the Washington Native Plant Society. It was a return trip to the Baker Ranch Preserve on Lummi Island, where other WNPS members recorded over 100 species in May.
The trail was a little over one and a half miles and ascended roughly 1,000 feet to a couple of open areas (balds) with fantastic views of Orcas Island and the rest of the San Juans. Nodding onion (Allium cernuum) was common in the balds, as well as several species of orchids along the trees at the edges of the balds. Other highlights for me included a mock orange shrub in full bloom (Philadelphus lewisii), a bone white phantom orchid (Cephalanthera austinae), and Cooley’s hedge nettle (Stachys Cooleyi), which is a member of the mint family with tubular flowers that radiate out from whorls atop the stem in a square pattern that looks somehow engineered.
As a beginner, my contributions were fairly minimal, but I did manage to add one species to the list: Pyrola asarifolia, or pink wintergreen.
I had stopped to admire a wide swath of blooming twinflower (Linnaea borealis) along the forest floor at the edge of the trail when I noticed a pink flower stalk with pink buds rising up several inches above the green carpet of twinflower. I immediately thought it was pink wintergreen, but I could see no sign of the dark green basal leaves that should have been present. I conferred with a couple of other members of the group and we all agreed it looked like pink wintergreen. As we read Pojar more carefully, it noted that some wintergreens (Pyrolaceae) have much reduced chlorophyll, not unlike the related Indian-Pipe (see my last post). These plants are apparently subsisting primarily on rotting vegetation in the forest duff, drawing nutrition from dead matter and (perhaps) associated fungi and other microorganisms, and dispensing with the typical strategy of producing photosynthesizing leaves.
Pojar even goes so far as to assign the leafless varieties of several pyrolas into their own designation, Pyrola aphylla (leafless wintergreen), but admits that this isn’t a true species. If not a species, what is it? I’d have given each species its own variety aphylla (ie, Pyrola asarifolia var. aphylla). But I suppose I’d just have been labeled a splitter — which is not a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but rather to biologists who divide families, genuses, or species into additional categories. Lumpers, by contrast, merge related related groups into broader categories.
