Bill Noble's Blog

Beginning in mid to late February each year, this tiny, vanilla-scented beauty makes an all-too-brief appearance in our forests. I’ve made pilgrimage for over twenty years to my favorite Calypso ‘grove,’ hidden away on steep, trailless land above San Geronimo. In most years, I suspect there are 150 to 200 plants here, with as many as 40 or 50 in bloom at once.

Yesterday, in delightfully damp weather, we found just eight. Notice the rain drips on most of the flowers.

Despite its intricate flower, each plant is just 5 or 6 inches high, with a single ribbed leaf laid flat on the duff. Like many orchids, it’s a trickster: it has elaborate fake nectaries, but no nectar. It specializes in the victimization of ignorant, newly hatched bumblebees, who fumble their way through a few bright, foodless Calypsos, pollinating them,  before learning better.

Calypsos are a single worldwide species in their own genus. They’re circumpolar, found in undisturbed and usually old forest from California and Arizona to Newfoundland in the New World, and from Scandinavia to Japan in the Old, but are nowhere abundant. They’re extremely vulnerable to habitat disturbance, and they’re part of the vast illegal international trade in orchids. The IUCN considers them “globally vulnerable to extinction.”

Do you remember the explosion of hunter-introduced feral pigs in Marin a few decades ago? Part of the motivation for the huge effort that was launched to eliminate them was that Calypsos were a favorite food.

These orchids, also called Fairy Slippers, grow from fingernail-size, bulblike corms, and a corm apparently lives only for about 5 years. Beginning in January, twin roots sprout from the corm, each root housing perhaps a dozen species of mycorrhizal fungi that mobilize mineral nutrients symbiotically for the plant (and probably, in the case of this orchid, also connect to the roots of trees and supply the flower directly with nutrients).

Don’t pick Calypsos: it almost invariably kills the plant. And don’t try to transplant them. Because they need their fungal symbionts to survive, you’re doomed to failure. Instead, find your own sacred grove. What could be better than a contemplative wander through the woods at the very greenest moment of the year?

Here and there, a few people are trying to learn to grow Fairy Slippers from their dust-sized seed. To explore that, here’s a fun link from the Pacific Northwest: http://calypsoorchid.com/

This week took us on an odyssey north, then west, and finally, on Friday, south: Mount Burdell in Novato, Inverness Ridge and Muddy Hollow in Point Reyes Seashore, and Gerbode Valley in the Marin Headlands. The bloom is accelerating, everywhere, but it’s still merely hinting at what’s to come.

Mount Burdell is Novato’s Tamalpais, with a huge Open Space preserve and, on its Bayside, Olompali State Park. Biologically, culturally and politically, Novato represents a transition toward Sonoma County. Land saving came late and imperfectly here, without the assistance of the vast Federal landholdings that bulwarked preservation in Southern Marin, and the community is more conservative and a bit less environmentally inclined, with a contentious city council that flips unproductively left and right decade after decade. But Burdell has been saved, and it is a treasure.

2-16-10 The first Mission Bells, or Checker Lilies, next to the Dwarf Oak Trail below Mt Burdell.

2-16-10 Hedge Nettles coming into bloom on Mt Burdell. Not a nettle (it doesn't sting), but a typically square-stemmed mint, alas with a quite unattractive scent.

One of our misty mornings this week, I slipped out of bed at first light and headed to Point Reyes. I parked at the top of the Limantour Road, ambled down the Bayview trail, poked around Muddy Hollow, and hiked back up the road to my car. I was back home a little after nine for breakfast with Tina. A couple of hours of stolen solitude in the midst of beauty is worth a month in church.

Much of my hike took me through the aftermath of the Mount Vision fire–impenetrable thickets of young, fire-spawned Bishop Pine, massed Ceanothus (Blueblossom) that will flood the air with its sweet musk in a few weeks. We should trust ourselves to life more than we ordinarily do: its capacity for self-renewal and healing is (almost) infinite.

On the way home, a burly male bobcat was taking a dignified stroll beside Sir Francis Drake Boulevard on the Olema Hill. He didn’t so much as give me a glance.

2-17-10 Flowering Currant in the soft chaparral along the Bayview Trail, with Red Elderberry leafing out right behind it

2-17-10 Salmonberry, named for its berries that are the bright orange-red of salmon roe. Great thickets of it adorn Muddy Hollow

2-17-10 The inconspicuous flowers and dark bronzy leaves of Coffeeberry beside Limantour Road

Friday was a complicated day. We crossed the Golden Gate to one of Tina’s regular appointments for an Alzheimer’s vaccine study she’s volunteered for. The drug has the gloriously indigestible name of bapineuzimab. This appointment was primarily for an MRI, so she spent 45 minutes motionless in a claustrophobic metal tube, having her brain imaged.

After that thoroughly urban experience, we did what any normal human beings would do: we fled to the Headlands for a contemplative 10-mile hike, up and all the way round the rim of the vast bowl of Gerbode Valley. Up on the ridge, two territorial ravens nipped and screamed at an unfortunate young redtail twenty feet above our heads. Slaty-black storms threatened to swallow Mt Tam, but pale-gold sun angled in to fill our valley.

2-19-10 A Rough-Skinned Newt clambers up the clear rill beside the Bobcat Trail. Newts can afford to be so clumsy and public because they carry in their skin the same powerful toxin that protects pufferfish. What a convenience to be inedible!

2-19-10 Wind-shorn Oregon Grape in a rocky crevice near Hawk Camp

2-19-10 Twinberry flowering in a willow thicket by the Bobcat Trail

2-19-10 If you like chewy names for flowers, it's hard to beat Sticky Monkeyflower. And if you like tough, beautiful plants, ditto. Bobcat Trail

2-19-10 We tramped 10 miles and saw perhaps a thousand gigantic Cow Parsnips heaving themselves up from the earth, but this was the only one in bloom. Hawk Camp

In the cool, foggy climate of the Headlands, forest denizens creep out onto the open hillsides. We usually associate Salal with the shady understory of redwoods and bishop pines

2-19-10 Two tangled Grass Iris in a remnant native grassland on the hillsides near the Miwok Trail

Here is the first of two or three iris galleries I’ll post through the spring, this for Inverness Ridge. Later, I may do a purely coastal one, and in a few weeks another, for the resplendent variety of color and form that will be exploding inland.

2-16-10 Grass Iris on the Dwarf Oak Trail at Mt Burdell. Not Douglas Iris at all, but a relative that's contributed its genes to Marin's hybrid swarm. Grass Iris has slender leaves, blossoms snuggled close to the ground, and an ineffable scent, worth getting on hands and knees for: 'orris,' a fragrance unique to a handful of iris species.

Iris is Greek for rainbow. Of the 300 kinds of iris in Old World and New, none is more a rainbow than Iris douglasiana—every color in the genus displays itself in this single species. Even better, Marin’s inland populations of Douglas Iris are by far the most rainbow-like of any from its range, Santa Barbara northward to central Oregon. The Douglas Iris of the Marin Peninsula (not including Point Reyes) have even been honored with their own name: Marin Iris.

Why the rainbow locally? Until suburbanization, Marin’s forests and woodlands were a biological island, cut off northward by broad grasslands that stretched into Sonoma. (Did you know we even had our own unique subspecies of chickadee, now swamped and lost in just a few decades as chickadees from the north colonized tree plantings southward?)

Botanists think Marin Iris are a ‘hybrid swarm,’ mostly Doug Iris, like the ones in this gallery from Inverness Ridge, but with abundant genes from Grass Iris (Iris macrosiphon), and, in central Marin, from another species now, curiously, found only far north and east of us, Iris fernaldii. Not much influenced genetically by the swarm, Douglas Iris on the headlands and the Point Reyes coastal plain are nearly uniform deep purples and blues.

Iris terminology: The three upright petals, called the standards, are actually the flower’s three petals. The three falls—usually marked with lovely white or black venation as a signal to pollinators—are the flower’s sepals, and not petals at all.

A dewy Douglas Iris on Point Reyes' Bayview Trail, showing standards and falls.

My title line, from a traditional British ballad, seems perfect for the winter we’ve been having, a winter itself perfect for non-flowers. So today is my Nonflowerblogging day. Hail the Cryptogams, a laundry-basket term for lichens and mosses and ferns and fungi and all their motley relatives, organisms that reproduce not with flowers and seeds, but with spores, created asexually (don’t worry, the poor things do have sex, but in a process that’s completely separate from spore production). This lack of flowers was so mysterious to our medieval forbears they believed that on one singular night each year–it might have been St. John’s Eve but don’t quote me–if you crept into the woods, you could spy the ferns wantonly blossoming.

Try this with your kids before the winter wanes: pick a fresh, perky mushroom, bring it home, cut off the stem and set it overnight on a sheet of white (or black) paper. In the morning, on the paper, you’ll find a perfect, richly detailed image of the mushroom’s gills or pores. That image is made of countless microscopic spores that matured and were shed during the night. Sometimes the image is a real surprise: independent of the color of the cap, the print may be brown or black, purple, pink or lavender, snowy white or creamy. Float a little hairspray gently over it and you can keep it as a permanent memento of our misty moisty weather.

Here’s our crypto gallery:

2-13-10 Pom Pom Mushroom on Pam's Blue Ridge, Fairfax. These capless, 'toothed' mushrooms are choice edibles also used widely in Chinese medicine. The several species are variously called Lion's Manes, Bear's Teeth and more. This fine specimen was graced a fallen bay laurel trunk.

2-12-10 A fire-scarred manzanita limb with glowing red-brown bark, wearing epaulets of lichen.

1-28-10 Mixed mosses and lichens on a rock near Bon Tempe Lake.

2-12-10 Feather moss on a rain-drenched bay tree on the Hoo-Koo-E-Koo Trail. Our mosses get so bone-dry in summer that their protoplasm shrinks away from the cell walls into a brittle ball, but add water and the moss greens up and begins to photosynthesize in mere minutes. YOU try that!