Category Archives: Nature

THE RAINS ARE COMING

July 5, 2014

The Santa Catalina mountains, like the whole of South Eastern Arizona, are very dry. It has been months since we had significant rain. A group of us hiked on the Oracle Ridge Trail. I did not expect to see any plants in flower, but there were at least seventeen species in bloom, though not in great numbers. Many plants were shriveled up. In a few weeks we should see two or three times as many.

One of our group noticed the twisted branches of a long-dead tree. He had been on the trail recently, and said that he had seen a nest on one of the dead branches a few days ago. We stopped to look, and, with the help of our binoculars, were able to make out a tiny clump of matter which was the nest. We were told that it was a broad-tailed humming bird’s nest. As we studied it, the hummingbird appeared, flew around, and settled in. In the photograph you can make out her silhouette.

Broad-tailed hummingbird on her nest

We were also told that the magnificent Parry’s agave were in bloom. The ridge is known for being buffeted with high winds. One year I found that almost all of the flower stalks had been broken off. This year there were a number of magnificent blooms. In the picture below you see Amy admiring it. I also include a picture of one of the broken stalks. In it the flowers, which are normally at the top of the stalk, are growing out of the sides. In the bud stage they are bright red, opening to reveal beautiful yellow flowers.

The beautiful Parry’s agave

Amy looking up to the agave blossoms

The inflorescence – note the red forms at the top

are the flower buds

An agave broken off by the wind, with new flower buds

On the return journey Amy noticed what seemed to be a large butterfly, in the middle of a plant. It turned out to be a silk moth, possibly Glover’s.

Silk moth

As I drove down the mountains I noticed the storm clouds moving in. By evening time, safe at home, we could hear the thunder and rain. To our great relief, it seems that the drought will soon be broken.

MOUNTAIN MAMMALS

June 25, 2014

On our mountain hikes we have come across some animals that I have rarely seen. One was a little black mouse, scurrying along so fast that I only managed to catch a picture of the rear department. His head was tucked under a fallen leaf.

A few days later we came across this pocket gopher at 9000 feet, almost the very top of the mountain. The gopher was just inches away from the parking lot (it was a Saturday and the mountain was very crowded.) We watched as he poked his head out, moved a little stone, then withdrew, only to emerge later in a burst of soil, always coming out of the hole head first. He even ventured a few feet away from the hole, and held still as if posing for my camera.

The name “pocket gopher” refers to the pouches in their cheeks where they hold food

They back into their holes, using their tails to feel their way

We are still waiting for rain. There was a quarter of an inch on the mountain last week, much of it in the form of hail, but nothing in the valley. The day time temperatures often rise above 100 degrees. About an inch of water evaporates from a bird bath in a 24 period this time of the year. Since our bird bath is an inch and a quarter deep, I need to fill it almost every day.

We managed to find some grasses, including Weeping love grass (Eragrostis curvula), a non-native species. It is an elegant looking grass. The flower parts are very small. I was pleased with this picture showing the anthers (in yellow) and the white fern-like stigmas.

WAITING FOR RAIN

June 14, 2014

Lately I have been going up the Santa Catalina Mountains overlooking Tucson several times a week, often visiting the same trail two or three days in a row. This week it was the Palisades Trail, a trail that goes down to Sabino Canyon, a distance of about 14 miles. We walked just the first mile or so of trail. The lack of rain has also resulted in a lack of wildflowers. Walking along the trail we saw a few plants blooming here and there. Of greater interest was the magnificent views. These views have opened up quite a bit since the Bullock fire in 2002 and the even worse Aspen fire of 2003. At the time some people said it would take twenty years to restore the forest. Well, after 11 years there are some areas with saplings up to about six feet high and large patches without trees without any saplings at all. The land is dry and the trees are seriously stressed as can be seen from this photograph.

The dry slopes

The spires are at the top of the mountain

On our walk we came to a beautiful overlook point, enjoying the view and the cloud patterns. We sat beneath the largest silver leaf Oak I have ever seen. Nearby was a huge log of a fallen Ponderosa Pine, with a lizard scurrying up and down the now vertical roots. It seemed quite content to keep us company for quite a while.

The view looking West

Our lizard friend holding perfectly still

Quercus hypoleucoides large tree

The Silverleaf Oak we sat under (Quercus hypoleucoides)

On the way back we came across the rarely seen Blue Lettuce. The botanical name tell us that it is a plant with milky sap (Lactuca) and grass-like leaves (graminifolia). In fact the leaves look so much like grass that it is virtually impossible to identify without the flowers. And the beautiful blue flowers open for a short time in the middle of the day. On our hikes we might miss seeing it on the outward journey, and then notice it on our return, probably because it was not open before.

Blue lettuce flower

Driving down the mountain the Madrone trees were very noticeable. June is their fall. They are an evergreen species, but a large portion of their leaves turn bright red in June before letting go. You can see the difference in these two pictures.

Madrone (Arbutus arizonica) in its normal green foliage

Arbutus with many of its leaves turned red in June

The monsoon season is due to start later this month. I am looking forward to seeing how the plants respond to our summer rains.

SUMMER SIGHTINGS

June 6, 2014

The June issue of TUCSON LIFESTYLE HOME & GARDEN has an article called: “Blood is thicker than watercolor” by Megan Guthrie. It is a fine write up of the father/son duo, Frank and Owen Rose. This is one of the paintings featured.

“Thundering Falls” by Frank S Rose

And here is a link to the article (pp. 10, 11).
http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=210119&p=10#%7B%22page%22:10,%22issue_id%22:210119%7D

It has been a long time since we have had significant rain here in Southern Arizona, but there are many flowers in bloom in the mountains. There is a field of Lupine (Lupinus palmeri), the only Lupine species growing high in the mountain (4500 feet and above). The flowers are normally blue, but in one patch we saw three albinos.

An albino lupine

Not far away was a rare example of Green gentian, or Deer’s ears blooming (Swertia radiata). These plants have large leaves, (like deer’s ears) and year after year store energy underground until they finally send up a flowering stalk. These can be as tall as eight feet.

A portion of a five-foot tall stalk

An individual flower

Another large plant is Cow Parsnip (related to Hemlock), whose name Heracleum lanatum, means woolly Hercules, referring to the Greek muscle man. The leaves can be larger than dinner plates. The flowering heads have many groups of flowers, and each group has many flowers. These tend to be irregular, with larger petals at the edges of the inflorescence.

This plant is about five feet tall

Looking down at the flower head

Two flowers – note how the petal size varies

Ed and I were hiking along the Mint Spring trail. We came to the site of the old spring, now dried up. Looking up we saw a hillside that used to be covered with Ponderosa pine. As you can see in this photograph, they all burnt in the fire 11 years ago. On one slope I did not see any new trees. About a quarter of a mile north there were many young pines. But the most successful trees after a fire are the Quaking Aspen. These trees regenerate from the roots, and a patch that seems to contain hundreds of trees may be just have one root system underground with many trunks rising out of the ground as if they were separate trees.

Looking up at the burnt forest. Note the interesting cloud patterns

A portion of the hillside with new pine trees

A portion of the hillside with new aspens

These days the temperature goes above 100 degrees in the valley, but the mountains are cool and beautiful. And the plant life on the mountain is slowly coming back after the fire of 2003, a fascinating process to watch.

FROM EARTH TO SKY

May 23, 2014

Last Saturday my niece, Marjorie and I went to the Mission Gardens in Tucson (at the Base of “A” Mountain) to witness the celebration of Saint Ysidro. The Tucson Herbalist Collective, of which she is a member, had a booth there.

Marjorie at the Booth with Pam Nakai

It was great fun seeing the young musicians of the Davis Bilingual School with their Mariachi Band, and the procession of people of different ethnic groups. San Ysidro was famous as a Labrador (Farmer) who enriched the plant offerings that helped to support the population.

The Mariachi Band coming around the corner into the Garden

The musicians relaxing before their next song

At the end of the celebration I caught this picture of some women harvesting in the fields of the San Agustin Mission Garden.

Women harvesting

Wednesday Ed and I had a beautiful hike along Turkey Run. It was a cool day, and though there were not many different species in bloom, some of them, like the wild strawberry, carpeted large sections of the forest floor. The botanical name “Fragaria” is related to our word fragrant. I tried to smell the flowers, but couldn’t detect any particular odor. The references is to the wonderful smell of the strawberries themselves, which we rarely see in the wild since they are snatched up eagerly by the wildlife.

The False Solomon’s Seal and Star Solomon’s Seal were just coming into bloom. Their botanical genus, Maianthemum, means “May flower”, so this is their month.,

Star Solomon’s Seal

On the way down the mountain Ed and I were intrigued by the cloud formations. The first was pretty well shaped like a box. The cloud itself stayed very much in the same place for a long time, but its shape was constantly changing. On getting home I found that it was a Lenticular Cloud (Altocumulus lenticularis), one of the Altocumulus cloud formations. As we drove down the mountain, looking toward the East we saw banks of cumulus clouds (about 3 kilometer altitude). To the right were many examples of lenticular clouds, about twice as high off the ground. These clouds form in areas where the wind currents are in standing waves, so they are held in the same place for a long time. At times we had trouble keeping our eyes on the road because of the fascination of these amazing clouds.

At first this lenticular cloud was a rectangle but soon it lost one of its corners

In a few minutes the same cloud became an oval

Regular cumulus clouds

A group of lenticular clouds

GETTING CLOSER

May 15, 2014

Last week a group of us were having lunch after a nature walk. Many of the people in the group were keen bird watchers, so you can imagine their astonishment when they heard the call of an owl in the middle of the day. One woman wanted to see the owl, so she went to investigate. Minutes later she returned, a little bit deflated. “It wasn’t an owl” she explained, “just another bird watcher making owl sounds.” I found out later that some little birds will gang up on an owl to drive it away. By making owl sounds the person was trying to trick some of these little fellows into emerging from the shrubs. I don’t know if he (or she) fooled the little birds. It fooled us.

Today we saw a few birds but I was more interested in getting a close up view of two plants I have known for some time – Bear Grass and False Indigo.

Bear Grass (Nolina microcarpa) is not a grass at all, but a very large plant in the Asparagus family. In May the plants send up a flowering shoot, four feet or more tall. The species is dioecious, meaning that male and female flowers are on separate plants. Whereas the flowering stalk is huge, the flowers are quite small, and we were having some difficulty telling which was the male and which the female. Eventually we found some with tiny little flowers clustered on the long stalk. I was able to get a close up of the flowers, and finally can tell the two apart.

This is a watercolor portrait I did of Bear Grass

The stalk on the left has the male flowers, not yet opened

On the right is the female, with some flowers open and many closed

The penny gives an idea of scale

The male flowers before they open

Here is a cluster of male flowers, with just one of them open

The male flower close up. Note the golden anthers

This is a close-up of a female flower of the Bear Grass

Later we came across a clusters of False Indigo plants – Amorpha fruticosa. From a distance it is hard to tell if the plant is in bloom or not. Up close, you can see the flower stalks, with the bright yellow anthers emerging from a deep purple base. I had never been able to photograph the individual flowers before today. I was thrilled to see what they look like. The genus name, amorphous, means “deformed” referring to the fact that each flower doesn’t have the usual form with a number of petals. It just has a single one curled around, with the anthers protruding from it.

A general view of False Indigo plants in a stream bed

This shows a part of a False Indigo plant with the flower spikes

Here is a flower spike with the flowers on the top portion not yet open

Here we see the individual flowers packed in. The yellow balls are the pollen bearing anthers. The flower petals are purple

A close up of two False Indigo flowers

On the home front, I have been watching the golden barrel cactus in our front yard. A few months ago I noticed that one of them was looking a little sickly. On closer inspection I found that I could see right through it in places. Our property is home to many ground squirrels, and I think they found a way of getting to the fleshy interior of the cactus. On the outside, the plants are well defended. Coming from underground, the ground squirrels found the soft underbelly, and have almost completely hollowed the plant out. They did the same to one of the other two. And yet all three cactus plants are still alive! They are gutted, but not totally defeated.

Our Golden Barrel cactus with holes in the middle where you can see right through the plant. Looking at the plant and moving your head around, you can see that it is almost completely hollow, and yet is still alive

A MILLION PLANTS?

April 26, 2014

Ed and I hiked Marshall Gulch over a week ago. This week his brother, Bob, joined us, and we hiked it again. And what a treat it was! We were able to notice new flower species in bloom, such as Fendler hawkweed (Hieracium fendleri), and Rock jasmine (Androsace septentrionalis) a tiny white flower.

Rock jasmine – about 3 inches high

On the trail we met a young man with a serious back pack. He stopped to chat with us, but how he had time, I do not know, since, if I heard him correctly, he was hiking the Arizona Trail (about 800 miles long from Mexico to Utah), and had gone from the start of the trail at the Mexican Border, to the Catalina mountains in four or five days. That is a distance of about 185 miles. I confess to feeling a little nostalgic. The trail beckons to me, but I certainly could not stand his pace (about 40 miles a day.) Wow!

We were happy to show Bob the Spring coral root (Corallorhiza wisteriana). This time I was able to get a fairly good photograph. This is the earliest of the mountain orchids.

Spring coral root with red stems and a white lip

I also saw the mostly bare branches of Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans), with last year’s fruit still on. I wonder why no one has eaten them. Hmm.

Poison ivy fruit

On our little piece of land in Tucson we like to let nature do the planting. Most of the flowers and shrubs on the property just showed up on their own. They call them “volunteers”. This includes the Brittlebush (Encelia farinosa), a perennial shrub that has masses of beautiful yellow flowers. At the back of our property there is a fence, and over the fence a piece of land sloping down to the alley. Most years I ignore this, and it just becomes a wilderness of weeds. A few years ago I got the bright idea of planting Brittlebush in the alley. It can grow quite large, and effectively eliminates weeds. So I transplanted a few seedlings that had “volunteered” in the front of our house. They did not take. A year later I tried again. Again they did not take.

Brittlebush

This year I adopted a new plan. They have just finished blooming, so I harvested the seeds from the many brittlebush plants on the property. I put them in a plastic bag and waited for rain. The forecast said there was a 20%chance of rain today, so I cleared the slope, scattered the seeds and raked them in. We will see if any of them germinate. My wife thinks I may have overdone it this time. Who needs a million brittlebush plants in their back yard?

SPRING IN THE MOUNTAINS

April 20, 2014

Last Wednesday Ed and I hiked in Marshall Gulch in the Catalina mountains. It was a beautiful, cool day, with water still flowing in the stream even though we have gone for months without appreciable rain. We found about a dozen species of flowers in bloom, some of them in great quantities. In addition to the hillsides covered with Valerian there were hundreds of the yellow
Wooton’s groundsel (Senecio wootoni).

Wooton’s groundsel plants

We were interested to see two species of Violets. the blue violet (Viola umbraticola) is seen mostly in the spring. The Canadian violet (Viola canadensis) can have a blue or pink tinge in the spring time but is mostly pure white in the summer and fall. It has seemed to me that the spring flowers are larger and have more color than the ones that decorate the forest floor in summer. Indeed, it is hard to tell them apart in the spring. The main difference, I believe, is that with the blue violet, the flower stems come right out of the ground, whereas with the Canadian violet, the flower stems branch off of leaf stems.

Blue violet

We heard lots of birds, and had a wonderful time catching glimpses of the deservedly famous red-faced Warbler (Cardellina rubrifrons). They flew around us, alighting briefly on different branches.

Canadian violet

We also saw a few strawberries in bloom. But the biggest treat was the Spring coralroot . (Corallorhiza wisteriana), the earliest of the mountain orchids. We saw seven plants, two of them in bloom.

Many of the big tooth maple trees still had leaves. I have often wondered how they manage to send out new leaves with the old ones, crumpled as they are, still hanging on to the twigs. I found the answer, as you can see in this photograph. The new leaf is forming between the stalks of last summer’s leaves.

Big tooth maple with two old leaves, and a new leaf bud growing between them.

A dead tree with rich colors showing where the bark has fallen off

The following day Dave and I hiked at the top of the mountain, eventually making our way to some huge rock formations, clearly visible from our homes in Tucson. We sat on these rocks for a long time just taking in the incredible view. We could see other mountain ranges stretching out for over seventy miles.

The view looking south

SPRING FLOWERS

April 12, 2014

Last Wednesday Dave delivered my new computer. It has been over three weeks since I let go of the old one. Most of that time I have spent trying to get over a heavy cough and cold, which meant that I was not getting out into nature the way I love to do. Sorry about the long gap between postings.

At the end of January (Jan 29) I reported finding a fungus (Puccinia monoica) that invaded a plant, Rock-cress (Boechera perennans), changed its growth pattern and made the leaves look like flowers. Yesterday Ed and I went to visit the infected plant to see how it was doing. Though it looks a little the worse for wear, you can see in the photograph that the growth pattern is still the same and the fungus is still turning the leaves on the tip of the plant yellow so that they look like flowers (on a plant that has pink and white flowers.) The other Rock-cress plants nearby have mostly finished blooming and have gone to seed. This fungus has been at work pretending to be a yellow flower for at least ten weeks.

The infected plant is projecting out from a steep bank

Some of the many dandelions in bloom

We drove up the mountain to Turkey Run. It is still very early in the season and there are not many plants in bloom. We did see a healthy crop of dandelion. Later we found the orange gooseberry in bloom (Ribes pinetorum). For several years I tried to photograph this plant, but was too late. Here it is, blooming in April. On the way down the mountain we found its cousin, Golden currant, (Ribes aureum) in full bloom.

Orange gooseberry flower. It begins red and turns white with age

The Golden currant flower

Orange gooseberry with flower, last year’s fruit (out of focus) and a penny for scaled

One of my favorite flowers on the mountain is the Green gentian or Deer’s ears (Swertia radiata). It produces a crop of very large floppy leaves each year for many years. In its final year, the leaf pattern is different as it sends up a flowering stalk which can be as high as 8 feet (as in this photograph). The stalk has hundreds if not thousands of pale green flowers. After it produces fruit, the plant dies. This means that it is monocarpic, meaning that it only flowers once in its life.

An eight foot tall blooming Green gentian

An individual Green Gentian flower

New Green gentian growth

Ed and I saw some Gentian plants with last year’s foliage all dried up and in the center, new growth. Within the next few weeks we will see if any of these will send up a flowering stalk. Last year there were very few that flowered, but lots of foliage.

Hillside with a number of Green gentian plants (we found 26 in the area)

We enjoyed seeing Arizona Valerian (Valeriana arizonica). This genus is known as a medicinal plant, acting as a sedative. These bloom early in the Spring where in some damp places high in the mountain they carpet the forest floor.

An Arizona Valerian near a rock

A cluster of valerian flowers with lavender tubes and white flowers.

This week end (April 12 and 13), I am participating in the Tucson Open Studio tour. Our home will be open from 11 am to 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Come on over. (9233 E Helen St.)

MORE WONDERS OF NATURE

March 17, 2014

On recent plant walks I have found a number of interesting items. On the 26th of February Ed and I were in Catalina State Park and came across a Prickly Pear, growing out of the trunk of a Mesquite tree. I have seen Prickly Pear growing eight feet high on a Saguaro but this was the first time to see one on a Mesquite.

On March the sixth, I drove alone up the Catalina mountains to the Butterfly trail head. It was surprisingly mild considering I was at about 8000′. I was looking for grasses in bloom, and found some, but was not able to identify them yet. On the way I almost tripped over a “witch’s broom.” This is a condition in which the growth pattern of a tree changes so that the branches and needles are much more thickly concentrated forming a kind of basket shape. I took two pictures – one on the ground, and the other propped on a tree stump. Reading about it I learned that trees have growth hormones. Some control the way the plant sends out new branches and some inhibit growth. When the hormones get mixed up the tree forms these very irregular masses of branches, twigs and needles that are considerably heavier than normal growth. In this picture you can see a central branch – so small as to be a twig really, that was supporting this mass. Evidently it broke, and the “basket” came tumbling down. I believe it came off of a Douglas fir.

Proceeding along the trail I looked for one of my favorite flowers, the Redfuzz saxifrage. There were still patches of snow on the ground. I learned before that the plant will actually melt enough snow to poke through snow. On this walk I found a few plants with their red buds. By now the buds have opened to reveal these delightful white flowers, harbingers of spring in the mountains.

Redfuzz saxifrage (Micranthes eriophora)

Picture taken a few years ago.

Kayla decided to spend her spring break with her grandparents in Tucson, getting away from one of the harshest winters on record in deKalb, Illinois where she is completing her last year of college at Northern Illinois University. She loved the warmth and sunshine, and hiked with us in Molino Basin. On part of her visit the three of us, my wife, Louise, Kayla and I went for a trip to Sedona. On arrival at the visitors center we were told about a trail to the iconic Red Rock Crossing that we had never been on before. We thoroughly enjoyed the walk. At our farthest point we stood at the edge of the fast-flowing Oak Creek. Later we visited the fascinating shops in Tlaquepaque and then drove up Airport Hill to catch the sunset. Hundreds of other people had the same idea. There was something really nice about seeing so many people gathered, hugging each other in the chill evening air, just to watch the sunset.
Before leaving Sedona the next day we hiked in the West Fork trail. On getting home I was inspired to write this little poem about our final walk.

A POEM OF GRATITUDE

by Frank S Rose, March 12, 2014

The sky overhead is striped with long curving lines of ice crystals
The ground underfoot is red and soft
A cluster of acorn woodpeckers plays tag darting back and forth between the bare apple trees
The air is soft and cool as groups of people make their way up the canyon.

The cliffs of red and ocher block out the morning sun
Up ahead it highlights an enormous Ponderosa pine and lays a patch of gold at its foot

We cross and re-cross the stream tracking damp footprints up the banks of red earth
It is early spring – the bare branches of red osier dogwood give a warm glow to the forest, especially where sunlight touches them
White Candytuft start to appear as we make our way up the canyon first a few – then a cluster, then a celebration.
There are a few yellow mustard plants just showing their colors
We see a thicket of ancient horsetail the great survivors of earlier times

Happy people greet us, including the couple that spoke to us as we waited to get seated at the restaurant last night.
Lively teens and wobbling infants add to the pageant of human life visiting this treasured part of Oak Creek.

We turn around just before stream crossing number 5 (out of 13) and soon are treated to new flowers
The pink Valerian we missed on the way up the canyon, now reminding us how easy it is to overlook nature’s treasures

We complete our timeless interlude to begin the long drive home.

Kayla and Louise walking toward Red Rock Crossing

People gathered to watch the sunset in Sedona

Wild Candytuft (Noccaea fendleri)

Frank S. Rose

Flowers and more