Backyard Pipevine

 

Backyard Dutchman's Pipe
(Aristolochia californica)

A couple of years ago I walked down to Strybing Arboretum and found someone who could sell me a pipevine plant. The clerk at the little store near the entrance sent me to the nursery greenhouses down by the California garden. I snooped around until I found a gardener who offered to see if they had one they could sell me, and she soon came back out with a fragile little sprig. For the price of sixteen bucks, quite a bit more than the typical potted plants I get at Sloat Garden Center, I had another California native to plant out back. It joined a hazelnut and a huckleberry that I planted more than ten years ago.

The little sprig looked so fragile that I didn't let myself get too attached to it. But it was still alive the following season, and I kept coddling it, giving it a little extra water and pulling out any nearby weeds or other competition. 

One day I happened to look down from the stoop above the garden and saw the cat sleeping right next to it, oblivious. I placed a ring of thin sticks around the base of the plant to make sure she didn't accidentally crush it. It has so far survived the cat, as well as visiting skunks, squirrels, raccoons, rats, slugs, and gophers. It's a winter-deciduous plant, and after its first growing season it soon looked even more pitiful than when I first planted it, so I was relieved to see new growth on it after its first winter.

At the end of January this year it flowered for the first time. Just one flower. Our yard gets very little direct sunlight (even when it's not foggy), so growth is unsurprisingly slow. Because it had already bloomed earlier this year, I was cheerfully surprised this week to see that it had bloomed yet again, and again with just one flower. 

And such a cool flower it is. According to the California Native Plant Society, "[t]he flowers have an unpleasant odor which is attractive to tiny carrion-feeding insects. The insects crawl into the convoluted flowers and often become stuck and disoriented for some time, picking up pollen as they wander. Most eventually escape; the plant is not insectivorous as was once thought."

I can't detect any odor at all from the lone flower I have, and looking down into the pipe reveals no fungus gnats or other critters, carrion-feeding or otherwise. When I trained my macro lens on the flower I did see a spider tiny enough to hide behind a grain of rice scuttle up the flower stalk. Maybe it is a hunter of other tiny visitors.

My neighbor, a former gardener at Golden Gate Park who at the age of 95 still does vigorous gardening by volunteering with the Recreation and Parks Department, has much more mature pipevine plants in his back yard. Much of his pipevine climbs the oak tree he planted from an acorn back around the time my wife was born, and his plants have hosted numerous pipevine swallowtail caterpillars (which I believe he got from the arboretum, if I recall right). I hope one day my plant becomes robust enough to be a host as well, and perhaps to provide a little genetic diversity should any pollinators visit the flowers in both our yards.

Hanging by a Thread

Phone Snap, Jan. 30, 2022

[UPDATE]

Phone Snap, Jan. 19, 2023

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Summer Morning

 

Summer on Cataract Creek

Mt. Tam's Cataract Creek, so named for its wet season splendor below Laurel Dell, is just a series of quiet pools separated by stretches of dry stones in the summer. I was on the trail at 7 a.m. the other day, feeling a little guilty for driving all the way up there on a bit of a wild goose chase, but also feeling very fortunate to be out in nature on a beautiful morning.

A couple of scenes I'd glimpsed in passing during a recent hike with my wife had stuck with me, so I thought they might be worth a closer look with the D800. One was a bloom of farewell-to-spring, and the other was this little fern-fringed section of the creek. Both spots were close together and only about a half-mile from Rock Spring. Despite the lack of novelty in these very familiar surroundings, I somehow spent a couple of hours exploring photo opportunities, about the same amount of time my wife and I had spent hiking our six-and-a-half mile loop a few days before.

The farewell-to-spring blossoms were still closed when I arrived, but the sun soon rose above the forest and opened them up. Around the same time the sun was opening them up, I noticed that the blossoms still in the shade were also opening up. I wondered if they were responding to some sort of circadian rhythm, or maybe temperature or a slight increase in brightness. Or maybe even the wood-wide-web: imagine the plants in the sunlight somehow communicating the new day's arrival to all the others nearby.

Fern & Pool

Morning Meadow #1

Morning Meadow #2

Flames of Grass

Arcs of Sedge & Spears of Mugwort

Farewell-to-Spring #1

Farewell-to-Spring #2

Farewell-to-Spring #3

Rosinweed

Fresh Green Cones of Douglas Fir

Close-up of Cone Scales & Rat Tails

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Camo Cat

 

We semi-adopted this neighborhood cat around the time she started showing up in pictures caught by my back-yard trail cam in 2016. By semi-adopted, I mean that we feed her, a practice I started when I reasoned that a well-fed cat would be less inclined to try to eat the juncos, California towhees, scrub jays,  and hermit thrushes that also use the back yard garden. Despite the excellent natural camouflage she has when snoozing on piles of leaves, she's not a great stalker (maybe she's too well-fed to make an effort). I've seen her take an interest in gophers a few times without ever making a serious pounce. What she really likes to pounce on is a can of Friskies Turkey with Giblets.

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