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Every park that is an official Green Seattle Partnership site gets to order 200 plants a year. This works out really well for 10 acre North Beach Park, with only about half an acre under active restoration (although we plant throughout the park). 200+ acre Carkeek, not as well. (But Carkeek also has other programs for getting plants and trees.)

Here are the plants we ordered for North Beach Park:

Wetland Plants and Shrubs

The wetland plants are, in no particular order, Black Hawthorn (Crataegus douglasii), Oregon Ash (Fraxinus latifolia), Pacific crabapple (Malus fusca), Small-fruited bullrush (Scirpus microscarpus), and hardhack (Spirea douglasii). These will go into the headwaters bowl, the wetland area we cleared of blackberry during the drought. The bullrush will go in the wettest part of the wetland, the shrubs and trees along the perimeter.

Upland Plants and Shrubs

Including: Vine Maple (Acer circinatum), Hazelnut (Corylus cornuta), Ocean Spray (Holodiscus discolor), Tall Oregon-grape (Mahonia aquifolium), Mock Orange (Philadelphia lewisii), Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorous) and Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum).

The main planting party will be on Saturday, November 24. Work off those Thanksgiving calories and have fun getting dirty. For more information, and to volunteer, please click here.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Yesterday Julie and I went to a new park, Ft. Ward Park on Bainbridge Island. We had a pretty satisfactory day of birding, seeing pelagic and double-crested cormorants next to each other, so we could actually tell them apart. We also saw five harlequin ducks, the largest group we’ve ever seen of those. Lots of American Wigeons, which never fails to make us start singing “American wigeon, floatin’ in the sea-ee/American wigeon, nommin’ on sea-wee-eed.” And some Eurasian wigeons mixed in. There were a few surf scoters, lots of rafts a little too far out on the water for us to identify, we heard a loon and maybe kinglets, and a few other birds. Not least, we saw a submarine, escorted by a couple tugs, go up the passage. Anyway, here are my pictures.

Dessicated rose hips

Nootka Rose (Rosa nootkana)

Tall Oregon-grape flowers

Mahonia aquifolium

Cottonwood bud

Rock flows

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Here are some bud, shoot, and seedling photos from North Beach Park:

Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parviflorum) buds

Inside-out flower or duck’s foot (Vancouveria hexandra)

One of the common names for this plant is the duck’s foot flower, because the leaves have three rounded lobes that look like… wait for it… a duck’s foot. If you look closely, or click through the larger size, you can see that the leaves already have a duck’s foot shape as they emerge from the bud. Vancouveria is very rare in Seattle, supposedly extirpated (locally extinct) but here it is. There is also vancouveria in Carkeek.

Indian plum or osoberry (Oemlaria cerasiformis) buds and flowers

Here is the entire set of North Beach Park photos (getting rather large). The photos I added today are towards the end.

ETA: The best spell-checker funnies for this time was “Malaria conformist” for “Oemlaria cerasiformis”.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

I went to North Beach Park this afternoon and ran into one of my master forester cohorts, collecting twigs for winter ID practice. I talked him into a difficult traverse with me, down the slope of the headwaters bowl to liberate what I thought was a single Western Red Cedar. It turned out to be a few, all covered with various weeds and the smaller ones being shaded out by salmonberry. So we “liberated” them. The tallest one (in the foreground) is big enough to survive mountain beaver attention. The one he has his hand on (you can’t really see it) might provide a nice snack.

What looked like had happened to us is a red alder had fallen, taking a mid-canopy Red Cedar with it. These were living branches that had survived the fall, reorienting and establishing themselves.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Nothing too distinguished but here you go.

Beach Pea (Lathyrus japonicus)

The flowers looked a little past their prime, but I liked the tendrils and seed pods. According to Plants of the Pacfic Northwest Coast, the Haida called beach pea “Raven’s canoe” because of the shape of its seed pods, which are black when ripe.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.