The Daily Bucket is a place where we can post and exchange our observations about the natural happenings in our neighborhoods. Birds, bugs, blossoms and more - each notation is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the natural patterns that are unwinding around us.
Seattle. October 5, 2012.
There are exotics in the forest. If they have stories, they're not telling. We might surmise the journeys they took before arriving here, but we'll never know for sure.
The southern third of the peninsula was tamed early, over a century ago. It likely held one of the northern remnants of Garry Oak prairie, open grassland dotted with Garry Oak and Madrona, easy to clear as the young, exuberant city began to spread. Open meadows now careen down the dry, south facing hillside here, one ending in an amphitheater where we watch Shakespeare in the summer, another in a tangle of Garry Oak, Madrona and Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum). Poison Oak is uncommon in Seattle, but here it runs rampant, climbing up trees and jutting out into the paths. Most of the year it stays hidden, camouflaged in green. Only in late summer does it reveal itself, leaves shining bright red against that same green.
September 9, 2012. Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum)
Perhaps the Poison Oak was here the whole time, but a nearby neighbor certainly arrived by some other means. Those of you on the east coast are likely familiar with Sassafras (Sassafras albidum), the root of Root Beer.
September 19, 2012. Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)
Sassafras' native haunts stop abruptly at the western edge of Texas, yet here it is in Seattle - a stand of young trees at the southern edge of the Forest peninsula. What to make of these? Perhaps some homesick West Virginian slipped some seeds into the ground on a warm day in recent October, thinking to establish a connection with home. Perhaps. But what to make of the grove of hundred foot Sassafras trees hiding amongst the mature Big-leaf Maples a mile north up near the tip of the peninsula? What of them? Another eastern transplant dreaming of home? Maybe a family member from one of the first white settlers? One of those families came from Pennsylvania. Perhaps. Perhaps not. The trees don't say; they just keep growing.
And deep in the forest there are these. Squirrel food, bright green. Prickly detritus scattered along the trail.
October 4, 2012. Chestnut. (Castanea sp.)
American Chestnut trees (Castanea dentata) once covered the east coast, from Maine to Mississippi. Then came the blight, and the Chestnuts died. Even so, I find ripening chestnuts in the forest every year, and I know their sources - a very few huge trees on a now blocked trail in the least traveled part of the Forest. I would like to think that these are a tiny community of American Chestnut, planted by some unknown sower sometime in the last century and untouched by the blight, but I have no way of knowing. What I do know is that settlers also arrived here from Asia, and these settlers may well have been homesick for their own chestnut trees, the Chinese Chestut (C. mollissima), and the one native to Japan and Korea, the Japanese Chestnut (C. crenata).
All I know is there are chestnut trees growing in the Forest. I have no clue how they arrived or from where, and I doubt the squirrels ever consider the place where their sustenance originated.
October 5, 2012. Poison Oak in the forest has turned red. Sassafras leaves are still green. Squirrels have begun to harvest chestnuts.
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Your turn. Where are you and what's happening in your neighborhood? Everyone is welcome to post their musings.
I'll be in and out all day, away in the evening.