The golden iris flourishes several
miles inland from our retreat!
What a great Saturday! The weather is mild with temperatures in the mid-60s and virtually no breeze. Spring is literally in the air with the turkey vultures soaring overhead, and Rufus hummingbirds clustered around our several sugar-water feeders.
Our unpaved access road is lined with red-flowering current and white-flowering Indian plum, both of which are harbingers of spring. Soon pink, bell shaped flowers will be bursting forth in terminal clusters on the Pacific rhododendrons, and the dainty, fragrant white flowers of the broadleaf chinquapin will be in evidence. Soon clusters of large white flowers will be covering the thimbleberries and, not to be outdone, the salmonberries will be displaying their showy blossoms in pink-red-purple tones.
Numerous groupings of Western buttercups, snowy Western trillium, English daises with their purplish-tinged tips and Arabis family members fill the spaces between these shrubs, evergreen, oaks and the forest's undergrowth. The large, umbrella-like clusters of white flowers offered by the prolific cow-parsnip are everywhere!
We're spending Saturday working on our access road to Highway 101. It's our fourth full day of cleaning up after the December storm wreaked so much havoc on the Oregon coast. Yes, it's true that the Northern Oregon coast was hit much harder than places like Port Orford on the extreme Southern coast, but we still had our share of destruction. At least seven groups of varying kinds of trees fell across our mile long access road, one collapsing even as Steven tried to clear the other trees so that we could make our way down to the highway on the morning following the big blow. Well, as they say, it was a hundred year storm, and some days it feels like it will take another hundred years to clean up the debris.
Still, there's always some joy to be found in any task and so it was on Saturday that we found clumps of crested coral tucked into the debris and surrounded by evergreen needles and mosses. Ranging in color from snowy white to dingy ivory, the coral's toothed branches stretched upwards 3-4 inches, another gentle reminder that spring and a new mushroom season are fast approaching.
Corals come in many
different colors, sizes and shapes.
Working our way down the road, my thoughts turned to mushroom encounters in previous Marches.
- March of 1991 found us at our retreat on Mt. Hood. The weekend had an auspicious beginning: as we drove up to the cabin around midnight, 10 morels were framed in our headlights! What a greeting! Never mind that the next morning we found our car covered with cottonwood fluff. It was a small price to pay for morels. The daytime temperatures were mild that weekend, probably into the mid-60s while we were in Brightwood.
- We spent time along the Sandy River a couple of years later, picking verpa bohemica that were growing in blackberry thickets under cottonwoods. Easily spotted by their tall, creamy white stems, many of them were in excess of 6 inches tall. Although some individuals have reported gastrointestinal upset as the result of consuming verpa, we love their earthy, bold taste. They're a gastronomical treat when the caps are stuffed and served in a light sauce.
- A cauliflower! Yes, a cauliflower was found near Old Mill Road in Port Orford in March of 2003. Encouraged by the find, we, of course, scoured the hills around our home near Humbug Mounting, finding instead generous handfuls of hedgehogs. Truthfully, the cauliflower and hedgehogs should not have been too great of a surprise because the winter of 2003 was so mild. I don't believe that we had one night that winter when the temperature dipped below freezing. That spring the flowers came early with the bold Oregon iris displaying its blue-purple-lavender petals by the 30th of March.
- In 2005, after attending a workshop in Canyonville, on a lark, Steven and I drove into the picturesque town of Myrtle Creek, past the covered bridges, along the river and then up into the hills, finding a basketful of winter chanterelles and hedgehogs along the way. What a delightful early spring excursion!
March memories can be wonderful, and I am optimistic that this April will bring much material for new memories. April has traditionally been the beginning of our season for warted giant puffballs and Northwest spring coral as well as a continuation of morels and verpa.
Speaking of verpa, will we ever forgot that Saturday in April of '93 when we collected over 25 pounds of verpa in a couple of hours with our dear friend Elwin in the Longview, Washington area? Probably won't ever forget the consequences of touching the stinging nettles that surrounded the verpa either! It was our first encounter with the nettles and certainly a painful one! However, the verpa were such a treat on the dinner plate that they quickly helped us to overcome the discomfort of the nettles.
More about April in another post. For now it's back to cleaning up the access road. Today, I have to be content to savor the memories of previous Marches and to anticipate the fruits of future April mushroom forays.
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