Erythronium 2008

[Susan Band]

Ian,
Interesting
Susan

[Paul T]

Ian,

I love that last pic of the pink with the white extending well up the petal.  Particularly nice combination.

[Anastasia]

Hello! Look at my ERYTHRONIUM 

[Anastasia]

It is my love. I grow up them from seeds. Here so they grow in a garden, everywhere, glades. I can send seeds.

[art600]

Anastasia

I thought your Fritillarias were good, but these Erythroniums are wonderful.

Arthur

[Ed Alverson]

I've been meaning to post some photos from my Erythronium explorations this past spring, but haven't had a chance to get to it.  However, seeing Ron Ratko's new seed catalog has prompted me to get a start, because this year he is offering seed of a rare Erythronium, E. grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum, which I had a chance to see in the wild for the first time this past spring.

Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum is a local endemic to a small area of the headwaters of the Salmon River, about a 2 or 3 hour drive northeast of Boise, Idaho.  This plant was first discovered by Elmer Applegate and formally described by him in 1933.  Because it is a local endemic and very poorly represented in herbaria, it has been pretty much ignored by recent monographers, and is not recognized as a valid taxon in Flora of North America.  In 1991, extensive botanical surveys were done which determined that this taxon is only found within Bear Valley, at elevations of about 6500 to 7000 ft., within an area only 15 to 20 miles across.  However, within this area, some populations are very large, with tens to hundreds of thousands of plants. 

It is always a challenge to time ones visit to catch a particular species in flower, but it turned out that there was only one weekend I could get away during the likely flowering season to visit this site.  It was mid-June that I made the trip, and it was June 14th, 2008 that I explored Bear Valley.  Here is a photo of one portion of the valley, along with a sign posted along the road that does a good job of showing the nature of the terrain.  The land is mostly owned by the US Forest Service, and is accessible by dirt roads, though the area is right on the edge of the River of No Return Wilderness area.

[Ed Alverson]

Bear Valley is covered by an extensive series of meadows, and though it was early in the flowering season, I could see that the flora is very diverse.   Here is a selection of wildflowers, including Wyethia, Olsynium, a mustard (Arabis?), Dodecatheon, and Claytonia.  It looked like the kind of site where floral display would present a different set of flowering plants every few weeks.

[Gerry Webster]

Ed - glad to see you are back on the forum  because I want to raise again the question of E.oregonum 'Sulphur Form'. Brian Mathew (in AGS Bull. 66 (3) 1998) describes this as having "very soft pale yellow flowers" & "although of unrecorded origin" says he has seen "similar plants in the Leach Garden, Portland, and these were of wild source from Northern Oregon". Does this ring any bells? I ask because I think one of my plants may be this form though received as something else.

[Ed Alverson]

Bear Valley is located at a high enough elevation that the winter snowpack takes some time to melt.  2008 was a relatively heavy snow year, which complicated my plants - I couldn't just rely on the flowering dates from previous collections or reports to know when to find Erythronium in bloom.  It turned out that my visit was about 10 days past the peak of bloom for Erythronium, but I was still able to find plants in flower in areas where the snow had taken longer to melt.  Fortunately it turned out to be a beautiful sunny day, and fortunately I found Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum soon after reaching Bear Valley without much difficulty.

Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum looks much like typical E. grandiflorum, with yellow tepals and red anthers.  However, it differs in lacking the appendages at the inner base of the petals that are found in typical E. grandiflorum (as well as many other Erythoniums).  Also, the style is essentially un-branched at the tip.  Most significantly, from a horticultural standpoint, the flowers are much smaller than most or all other forms of E. grandiflorum.  Associated with this reduction in flower size is a propensity for plants to produce many flowers on a single flowering stem (more on this in a bit).

[Ed Alverson]

The largest concentration of E. grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum is found in "Big Meadows", which is up near the headwaters of Bear Valley Creek.  I had to drive over a few small snowbanks on the dirt road to get to this area, as the area is not frequently visited this early in the season.  The plants here were unfortunately a bit past their peak of bloom, which is seen by the fringe of white on some of the flowers that have begun to fade.  This is the place where Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum carpets the meadows by the hundreds of thousands.  Here, in the full sun of the open meadow, some of the plants had numerous flowers.  Four-flowered stems were not uncommon, some had more.

Also I found a single plant of what I presume to be a genetic mutant, with pale, almost white tepals.

My conclusion, after seeing Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum in the wild, is that it is definitely a valid taxon and should be recognized as such in our floras.  The small flower size, often with multiple flowers on a single stem, along with the un-branched stigma and missing appendages at the base of the tepals, is very reminiscent of Erythronium pluriflorum, a local endemic of subalpine habitats in the Sierra Nevada Mts. in California.  In fact, the relationship of Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum to Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. grandiflorum is very reminiscent of the relationship of Erythronium pluriflorum to E. tuolumnense, a larger yellow-flowers species that grows at lower elevations in the Sierra Nevada.

To be honest, I suspect that Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. nudipetalum will prove to be a very challenging plant to grow and flower in low elevation gardens in humid climates.  But if one can provide a cover of snow in the winter, or at least keep it from rotting off during the winter, it is at least worth a try.  I suppose that anyone who can grow typical Erythronium grandiflorum ssp. ssp. grandiflorum might want to give it a shot...

[Ed Alverson]

I should mention that I did not see any bears while I was in Bear Valley, but I did see other wildlife, including a small herd of elk (what people in Europe would call red deer).  And in western North America, where one sees elk, one also should be on the lookout for their predators - wolves and mountain lions.  As I was walking along the road in Big Meadows, taking in the erythroniums, I noticed a set of animal tracks right in the middle of the road.  They were big paw prints - and not that I am an expert on animal tracks, but I'm pretty certain that they tracks from a mountain lion that had recently been out enjoying the erythroniums as well.

It was a fitting conclusion to a rewarding visit to an amazing place.

[Ed Alverson]

Ed - glad to see you are back on the forum  because I want to raise again the question of E.oregonum 'Sulphur Form'. Brian Mathew (in AGS Bull. 66 (3) 1998) describes this as having "very soft pale yellow flowers" & "although of unrecorded origin" says he has seen "similar plants in the Leach Garden, Portland, and these were of wild source from Northern Oregon". Does this ring any bells? I ask because I think one of my plants may be this form though received as something else.

Gerry,

I haven't see garden plants of the "Sulphur form" myself, but as we discussed in the forum previously, populations of Erythronium oregonum that have pale anthers (ie, ssp. leucandrum) have tepals with a cream to pale yellow tinge to them, as compared to the basically white tepals and deep yellow anthers of ssp. oregonum.  Last spring I found populations of both ssp. oregonum and ssp. leucandrum in the Portland area, and both types are generally distributed through western Oregon (though ssp. oregonum extends to higher elevations and ssp. leucandrum is more common at low elevations).

Perhaps this coming spring I will have a chance to get to the Leach Garden during the Erythronium season.  If I do, I'll post some photos.

Do you have a photo of your plant that you could post?  What was the name under which you received it?

Ed

[mark smyth]

Ed is the close shot of the paw print a cast you made or is it a trick of light making it look raised

[Jim McKenney]

I noticed a set of animal tracks right in the middle of the road.  They were big paw prints - and not that I am an expert on animal tracks, but I'm pretty certain that they tracks from a mountain lion that had recently been out enjoying the erythroniums as well.

Ed, the tracks seem to show nail prints extending from the pad print: cats (other than cheetas whose genus name, Acinonyx, is a hint at this)  typically don't walk with extended nails, do they? Isn't it more likely that the prints are wolf prints? A field guide I consulted gives the length of a gray wolf print as 5 inches, that of a mountain lion 4 inches.

[Ed Alverson]

Jim,

Like I said, I am not an expert!

Peterson's Field Guide to Animal Tracks does say that the track of a mountain lion "rarely shows the claws", and wolf tracks do show the claws.  The first photo clearly shows the claw marks.  (the close-up does look raised but that is just a trick of the lighting).  It may be possible that the conditions underwhich the tracks were formed (a saturated sandy clay road surface that had subsequently dried after the tracks were made) allowed for a sufficiently deep track to be made that the claws were able to show.

The shape of the paw prints looks to me a bit more like the drawing of a mountain lion print, than the shape of the wolf print in the field guide.  The toe pads of the mountain lion are more circular than elliptic, compared to the wolf.

Unfortunately I didn't take a photo with a ruler or something else for scale (I was also running out of room on my memory card at the time!) but you can compare the width to the adjacent tire tracks, clearly they are in the 4" to 5" range but I don't think I can say any more precisely.

On the other hand, there actually is a resident wolf pack in this part of the Idaho mountains so it certainly is very possible that they may be wolf tracks (and botanically sophisticated wolves, it would appear!).  I didn't hear any wolves howing in the area, but I was only there in the daytime.

Ed