www.farreachesfarm.com

We did something recreational last week with our dear friends Cathy & Betsy from New Hampshire.  We finally got up into the Olympics to do some hiking and opted for the Tubal Cain trail which is a long but gentle grade which allows for conversation!  The wildflower display was at its peak with wonderful overlap from early bloomers such as Erythronium and Douglasia into the expected later bloom of Lilium columbianum and Delphinium. 

A treat to see the endemic Campanula piperi growing in profusion on a fine dark shaley scree.  This dwarf species requires excellent drainage and is a good trough plant.  Small leaves on ground-hugging plants with star-shaped nearly stemless mid-blue flowers.  We amused ourselves finding subtle variations in blueness (there are white ones but we didn't find any) as well as petal shape which varied from pointed to more rounded and reflexed in one case.

Another endemic (endemic means native to this area only so found in the Olympics and nowhere else) which delighted us was found at the first pass where the interior of the mountain range was laid before us with the intervening valley below.  Here Viola flettii was in bloom with pinkish-lavender flowers held just above somewhat fleshy rounded leaves colored a rich maroon underneath.  This inhabits the most improbable of habitats favoring rock crevices not directly exposed to full sun.  Sometimes you will see this on a fine grained scree but likely it has its roots down into an underlying rock crevice.

One of our favorite endemics was present here in quantity and while long out of bloom, the tuffets of finely dissected dusky silver leaves were still a pleasure.  This was Synthyris pinnatifida ssp. lanuginosa or Cut-leaf Kittentail.  This has short spikes of fuzzy lavender-violet flowers just as snow melts from the high exposed ridges.  We grow this in one of our troughs from seed collected on a nearby ridge some years back.

Or the June that wasn't for me.  Yesterday was my first sort of productive day in over 3 weeks after being floored by pneumonia.  I know we all call it Juneuary here as it is usually cool and cloudy but pneumonia??  I can't remember the last time I spent days in bed during peak season.  So incredibly frustrating to be unable to work except for token appearances.

And if it was frustrating for me, imagine poor Sue who (what would the feminine be for Herculean? Amazonian?) soldiered on picking up my slack while coping with her own respiratory issues.  When you are chronically behind this time of year and you have essentially Mar-Jul and some in Fall to make your living, losing a key month will keep you up at nights especially when it follows one of the more difficult springs in memory as far as weather.

So if we have seemed a little off and haven't gotten back promptly on queries, this is why.  I expect to be fully functional by next week so that excuse won't play much longer.

We did do something fun last week though.  In appreciation for working their tails off for us this year, we took our staff and volunteers to the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island.  Andy Navage, Director of Horticulture, met us and generously gave us a grand tour of the grounds weaving stories of the past with visions for future directions.  The grounds were incredibly well-maintained and the setting and gardens have few rivals in this country.  We were vendors at their inaugural spring plant sale this year which was a huge success and we could easily imagine then that we were at a Royal Horticultural Society sale on the grounds of a National Trust garden in the UK.  If you have the chance, go check it out.  It is a true destination and a great place to bring guests.  And look for us there next spring at their 2nd spring plant sale!

Needless to say, I made a beeline for the bed when we got home!  Now I'm looking forward to getting some wind back pretty soon so we can get some hikes in this summer as well as getting some delayed projects done around here.  I'm a big proponent now of getting the pneumonia vaccine - I'm so not having this happen again!

 

Hello,

We have a small retail native plant nursery and also provide wetland and upland restoration services as well as seed collection.  I was given your card by a client and was looking at your website and was wondering about a couple things.  I do not mean any disrespect with these questions, just looking for greater understanding, so please keep that in mind!

Why do you feel the need to go to china and bring plants back plants that are native over there?  I am assuming you have considered the potential impacts to our ecosystem from introduced species and other potential negative repercussions and would appreciate hearing your point of view, if you care to share.  

Thank you for your time.

 

While we love our native plants and are members of the WNPS, we find the lowland western Washington flora comparatively depauperate from an ornamental standpoint when contrasted with the incredibly rich flora of China or Japan, South Africa or Chile for example.  Many of the native species we enjoy the most are alpine or east of the Cascades and it could be argued that they are more exotic to our lowland Puget Sound gardens then say Trillium camschatcense from Japan growing in conditions comparable to Trillium ovatum.  The western Chinese flora and the Japanese flora have many parallels to our own plants as well as to those of the east coast and reflect an ancient common ancestry.

We’re students of plants and one cannot help but be intrigued by familiar plants in exotic locales that offer excellent ornamental value to our gardens.  The vast majority of our ornamentals, edibles and pharmaceuticals are not native.  The Asian ecosystem is under tremendous pressure and we do feel like we are potentially saving species from extinction and contributing to the sum of human knowledge by introducing new species or new forms of species to cultivation for purposes of scientific study and just plain enjoyment. 

We do consider the invasive potential of the plants we bring back and are surely among the most stringent at not collecting and/or destroying plants which show such tendencies in cultivation.  Needless to say, everything is inspected by the USDA upon entry.  Our own property is compromised by alien invasive Phalaris so we are well aware of the potential impact.  One could suggest that with looming climate change a broader palette of plants might not be such a bad thing.  And we can’t forget that we are not native ourselves and are the single most harmful and destructive invasive species in the history of the earth.

We totally support what you and others are doing with native plants and wish you great success.  Much like you it sounds like, we are following our passion and differing only in offering regionally appropriate plants from a broader geography.  If you are ever out this way, do stop in.  We would enjoy showing you what we are doing.

Kelly Dodson and Sue Milliken
Far Reaches Farm

like the anticipation inherent in sowing seed.  Especially seed collected with difficulty in some remote region and most especially if it is seed of possibly something new.  Each seed is a gift-wrapped promise of possibility.  Each seed carries a very clear video playback of where it was collected and is more vivid than any written journal.  Clematis sp. CGG167 for example is one such plant.  We were coming back down from the top of a mountain in the Dayao Shan and just 600' below the summit noticed a Clematis overhanging the trail.  It was easy to see how we missed it on the way up as it was layered on top of the overhanging scrub and totally invisible from below.  That and we were breathing darned hard!

Looking at the Clematis, two things struck me immediately.  The first were the small amber feathered tufts of seeds and the second was that this was an evergreen species.  Love evergreen species!  This was ringing no bells of recognition so into the deep brush I plunged only to see Clematis seeds shatter and blow away in the wind.  Damn!  Very ripe and dry and very fragile.  And very hard to reach without them all falling off and blowing away.  One of the rare times I wished for rain or damp weather which would have kept those seeds nicely intact.

Hmmmm.  What to do - how to approach this?  Work out on this log a little ways and just jump a bit and Yes!  a seed head in my clenched fist as others swirl by and away out of reach.  With most Clematis a single seed head would be a good haul but this is a stingy one with few seeds per head.  And they are very dry - well beyond what is considered ideal for germination.  I carefully put them in the seed envelope and jot a few observations and think that this is a longshot. 

But what a great longshot!  I'm standing here on top of a remote mountain with amazing plants all around me not the least of which is an impressive tree of the rare conifer Fokienia hodginsii just a few paces ahead of me.  I've got seeds in my pack from just up the trail of a broadleaf evergreen tree that none of us have the faintest clue what it is (and subsequently, some of the best botanical minds in the US and the UK are equally stumped - this is when we need that angel sponsor to say " "Kelly & Sue - here is funding - go see this tree in flower and collect herbarium specimens and let's get this figured out.  The chance of perhaps a new genus is worth the effort.") and now I have at the very least, a few seeds of an uncommon Clematis.

This particular sowing is one that I look at 2-3 times every day, willing germination with a focused intensity and not believing for a minute in that whole watched pot thing.  Finally and well after our other Clematis collections germinated, one valiant seedling appeared.  This one little pair of cotyledons might be all we get and if we can nurture this on, this single seedling will become cuttings and will flower allowing us to finally identify it and hopefully set seed.  And so the one will become many and each of those plants will carry the memory of one of the best days in my life.

 

 

It's bad enough when the rabbits cruise the garden and eat the little clumps of Ophiopogon chingii down so tight they resemble some spherical Brillo Pad or when they selectively decide that out of all the Hepatica in the garden, the hoped-for drift of Hepatica nobilis 'Rubra Plena' is simply "Le Buffet du Lapin".  (That would be a "buffet for rabbits" by someone whose French is heavily influenced by Cotes du Rhone varietals.)

No, they can't settle for cruising the can yard and munching the smorgasboard arrayed down the aisles - they must further exacerbate the indignity by standing in the middle of flats and leaving piles of slow release fertilizer pellets.  Oh no, that is apparently not enough during this year of an upswing in the rabbit population.  They have to take it to the next level.

I was out in Hooker (which is our farthest greenhouse named for Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker) and saw scattered leaves of Saxifraga aff. rufescens from Nepal scattered in the aisle and looking at the flats of plants, saw that a number of them had been eaten down to the crown. We leave the doors open for ventilation at night but now we have to close Hooker.  Great.  One more thing to do.  And open it in the morning.  Two more things to do.  

That worked great until I was moving the big pot of Carmichaelia odorata which I use to block open the back door of Kingdon-Ward (Our second furthest greenhouse named for Frank Kingdon-Ward) and saw that the ranked flattened leaf-like branches had been pretty much stripped bare.  And I had already in my mind planted the new display container with this exact plant as a centerpiece.  Oh well.  The pinkish lavender Pea-like scented flowers on a uniquely structured plant would have been real fun in a container.  Now those embryonic flower buds and architectural branches are in the form of compressed oval pellets on top of that flat of Saxifrage in the can yard.  Now we get to close KW at night and open KW in the morning.  Three and four more things to do.

So we run the terriers at night and they have great fun and maybe do more damage then the rabbits ever thought of but we all go to bed knowing we at least did something and that we were all magnificent in that attempt.  It was with great interest this week that we observed tufts of rabbit fur in the field so perhaps the coyotes have deigned to lend a hand, amused at our ineptitude.

We've been having great fun corresponding with folks in the UK about the new Lily we found on Mt Saramati.  Saramati straddles the border with Nagaland in NE India and Burma (we're not big on acknowledging the military dictatorship's name of Myanmar) and is the tallest mountain in the region outside of the Himalayan chain.  To our knowledge, Saramati had not been climbed by westerners and the upper slopes and summit never botanized.  I've blogged a bit about Saramati before but will go into a bit more detail.

We were there in the fall of 2003 on a 4 person trip organized by Steve Hootman of the Rhododendron Species Botanic Garden.  This was just before travel restrictions to this area due to fighting were relaxed.  One of the plants we hoped to find was Lilium mackliniae, a diminutive species endemic to this area and introduced only from two earlier collections.  The first introduction was in the 1930's by Frank Kingdon-Ward and the lily was named for his wife, Faith Macklin.

We climbed the second highest peak in Nagaland, Mt Japfu, with high hopes but no lily was found.  (80'+ Rhododendron arboreum trees and Rhododendron macabeanum were no small consolation).  We headed for Saramati which was some days distant in a section of Nagaland controlled by the Naga Rebel Army who are seeking independence from India.  Our guide was terribly nervous and told us that if they want to take our jeeps and all our belongings that we were just going to thank them very much. 

Drawing nearer to Saramati driving all day on narrow featureless dirt roads in the jungle, we entered into a dark draw when out of the forest into the middle of the road stepped a man in fatigues with a machine gun.  Needless to say we stopped.  Looking out the windows at the top of the low ridge flanking the road on both sides, we saw more machine guns and rifles pointed at us.  Our guide says, "Stay here - I'll go talk but we probably won't be allowed to continue."

There was much talking with the captain of the guard who then came to the jeep to see us.  He spoke some English and Sue disarmed him (figuratively) by telling him that his country was very beautiful.  The distinction being that it was the Naga's country and not India's.  The upshot was that were granted access provided we gave the captain a ride back to the nearest town 2-3 days distant upon our return.  Done!  We're going to Saramati!

This was the hardest hike/climb any of us had ever done.  Saramati is 12,600' and vegetated on the summit but snow-covered in the winter.  While it was not a technical climb, there was no trail and it was wicked steep.  We were accompanied by a guide from the last village of Thanimir, along with 5 village guards carrying old and large rifles as protection against the Burmese rebels as well as tigers.  The rifles came in handy as one of the guards used his for me to grasp the end of the barrel and help swing me across this narrow rock face which plunged away too far for much contemplation.

There were very few plant collections made on this climb due to the physical nature and the time constraints of having to make it far enough along on the second day to get to our base camp and be able to get to the summit on the third day and back down to base camp.

I think I only cried 3 times on the trail.  There are virtually no photographs from any of us except for base camp and the summit and a lunch break as it was all a dangerous hard scrabble.  One of the highlights though was a single dried capsule of seed from a small withered lily which Sue found.  We were hesitant to proclaim it as mackliniae because it was small enough to perhaps be Lilium nanum which might be in this area.  As it turns out, this proved to be the only lily we found in Nagaland and a lot of hopes were riding on a few papery wafers of seed.

We returned home and sowed Lilum sp. NAPE 049 which was the collection number assigned in the field for the 49th seed collection on the Nagaland-Arunachal Pradesh Expedition.  The seeds germinated in the spring and so we waited.  Three or four years later we got a call from Steve who said he had one blooming and it was mackliniae but quite a different form - Hurray!  We were ok with him beating us to flowering as one of our Rhododendron collections, R. dalhousiae v. rhabdotum, bloomed before his, not that we are competitive or anything.

Steve sent seed to Peter Cox in Scotland who flowered it and who just this winter had an excellent article in The Plantsman detailing the three forms of Lilium mackliniae in cultivation.  And Ian Christie has just written a nice piece on Lilium mackliniae the current Scottish Rock Garden Journal. 

Current thinking in the UK is that this might be a new species and there is going to be a botanical review of this new introduction this spring to determine if it merits specific status or is perhaps a subspecies of Lilium mackliniae.  However it works out, Sue found a pretty exciting plant! This is what really gets us going is finding and introducing new plants and expanding the knowledge of a species or genus.  It just doesn't get any better than this.

 

Our last seed collecting trip to SW China is gaining in significance as we gain perspective by reviewing our approximately 200 collections and realizing just how many are new species to cultivation including one small evergreen tree which so far is completely stumping the experts.

We have a Primula germinating now as well as a Saxifrage in the fortunei alliance which are likely new introductions for example.  These were from high elevation in the Wumengshan in an area not previously botanized.  The peak was basically a rounded broad limestone ridge with rock outcrops tumbled about the low scrub sprinkled in the mixed grassy/herbaceous swathes.   Generally full exposure to the elements including sweeping wind.

In such a setting one can initially be put off by the apparent paucity of the flora.  No trees, no true alpines, seemingly limited diversity of woody shrubs and few herbaceous plants of interest.  And it took 2 days to get here.  And it will take 2 days to get somewhere new.  Great.  Damned if we are going to collect another Cotoneaster just so we can collect something.

Plant hunting however is our calling and even landscapes such as this offers treasures if one thinks like a plant and is willing to put out the extra effort and get dinged up a bit.  Off to the left through the scrub is a 20' high undulating east-facing small cliff framing in this small area.  Most of the cliff is exposed with little of interest but what is behind that thicket of shrubs growing against that one part?  Possibly something different as it will be somewhat shaded.  Pushing through the grasping branches and hoping that the time spent and new scratches and rips will be worth it, I find that the shrubs were hiding narrow deep slots like miniature canyons in the rock face. 

These are the perfect niche environment and are what we are always looking for as often this is where the good stuff is hiding.  Just so in this case.  This sheltered narrow cleft was completely shaded and retained much more moisture and humidity than the surrounding area.  The rock crevices and mini-ledges were cloaked in moss and populating this moss were perhaps six plants of a Saxifraga species with long panicles which places it in the section belonging to the familiar Saxifraga fortunei.  This group is a favorite of mine and I could wedge into the opening just enough to stretch out and grasp a few of those ripe seed capsules.  It was with thanks that I directed some dust-like seed to hospitable spots on the vertical walls.  An amazing and quite unexpected find and one that would surely have been bypassed except for the tingle of intuition.

The Primula was further along but in much the same aspect.  There was scrub masking a large individual outcrop which upon penetrating revealed a shaded rock face with narrow 4" mossy ledge under a small overhang.  It was this ledge that held the Primula and only careful examination revealed the 3" dried scapes with the small seed capsules and small leaves already well-withered.

With both the Primula and the Saxifraga, it is quite likely that I was observing the sole populations on this mountain as these were such specific environments.  These specialized niche environments when coupled to the fact that elevationally they are at the highest point in this section of the range makes it quite likely that these are both very rare and very susceptible to extirpation given even minor fluctuations in climate or human impact.

The climate is causing stress to such fragile flora.  The region was in the midst of a drought when we were there this fall which after following a late killing frost in spring made seed collection challenging.  The human impact is easier to gauge as it is pervasive, extensive and unapologetic.  To potentially introduce species such as these to cultivation and make them available for study as well as perhaps saving them from extinction is a grand purpose. 

Sometimes we feel like our talents are being underutilized even though we have an excellent nursery with such a range of diverse plants.  Somehow merchandising pales compared to species preservation.  In an ideal world, there would be funding and grants comparable to those given for food and farming to enable such commercially unprofitable but critically important ventures.   We really do feel as though this is our talent and we should be maximizing our potential.  Introducing new plants, finding new species, saving species, adding to the sum of scientific knowledge - it's heady stuff. 

Maybe we could be plant hunters for Big Pharma as who knows what chemical compounds that little Saxifrage developed in order to survive?  Quite a few people said that they hoped it was a profitable trip for us.  It was and immensely so from a horticultural and botanical standpoint which is why we went.  Profiting monetarily from these trips is always secondary for us and regarded as a bonus when it happens.  We did something really good here and we should be doing a lot more of it as habitat pressure is getting increasingly critical.  If anyone out there has any suggestions on how to make this happen, we would be most attentive.

I just got an email from Ann L. who said we haven't been letting anyone know about Sue's ankle which she fractured on our seed collecting trip.  It was as good a break as you can get and actually better than if she had stretched or tore some ligaments so she is doing very well although it is still quite sore. 

She has a walking cast/splint which she has given up on this week as it is uncomfortable.  It is a fracture that is weight-bearing if you are careful but if you do a sideways movement or walk on uneven ground than you are in trouble.  So she is getting around fine and if anything is walking too much.  I've told her that just because you can walk on it doesn't mean you need to take the dogs on a 3 mile walk but she is a stubborn Northeasterner whereas I would be milking it for all it was worth.  During the snow for example. she was out in the nursery shoveling snow for 4 hours from the aisles to bank and insulate the containers.  Oddly enough her ankle was sore that night.

Right now she is cleaning seed from the gardens and sowing.  Lots of Nomocharis aperta and pardanthina which is great as well as seed from our yellow-foliaged blue Meconopsis.  We are in our blue sky donut hole of a rain shadow today as it is apparently raining elsewhere.