Alberta Wanderings 2010

[cohan]

Cohan: glad you are continuing to wander in 2010! Great stuff and please keep up the detail!! Does Rubus arcticus produce a lot of fruit? It grows in Norway but is quite local in its distribution apart from in the far north (Troms and Finnmark) and fruit is uncommon. How about R. stellatus - do you have that one too?  

 

thanks, stephen
my (admittedly limited) book does not mention stellatus, but from the little i found searching online, it seems to be in b.c. and alaska..
i was trying to tell, this year, if there was something besides pubescens and arcticus (of course idaeus grows everywhere) or whether they hybridised, as i see plants of presumably pubescens with some red in the leaf more typical of arcticus, and pinkish flowers, but i think its just natural variation in pubescens..

arcticus does not produce a lot of fruit here, at least in the wild, haven't tried cultivating it yet; same for pubescens.. its also possible that they are fruiting more than i know, but many berries are eaten by critters before i see them! certainly by the very wide spread of the plants, it must be getting seeded around...

[cohan]

cohan, sorry i forget that alberta is a big country, not so in germany 
thanks a lot..
cheers
chris

no problem, christian at least we have pretty good and often straight roads, so you can go far, fast!
this is what wikipedia says:
661,848 square kilometres (255,500 sq mi), an area about 5% smaller than Texas or 20% larger than metropolitan France.

[christian pfalz]

  cool.....
cheers
chris

[Stephenb]

thanks, stephen
my (admittedly limited) book does not mention stellatus, but from the little i found searching online, it seems to be in b.c. and alaska..
i was trying to tell, this year, if there was something besides pubescens and arcticus (of course idaeus grows everywhere) or whether they hybridised, as i see plants of presumably pubescens with some red in the leaf more typical of arcticus, and pinkish flowers, but i think its just natural variation in pubescens..

arcticus does not produce a lot of fruit here, at least in the wild, haven't tried cultivating it yet; same for pubescens.. its also possible that they are fruiting more than i know, but many berries are eaten by critters before i see them! certainly by the very wide spread of the plants, it must be getting seeded around...

I was particularly interested as I recently posted a picture of what we call here Allåkerbær, which is a Swedish-developed hybrid between Swedish R. arcticus and North American R. stellatus (http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=5556.msg155356#msg155356). It came on the market in 1980 and it was quite popular here for a while (there are at least 4 varieties and you have two grow two of them for fruit, Linda and Anna being the two I have I think). It’s quite invasive and I now confine it to a big wooden tub. I’ve wanted to also “get to know” the parents for some time but seed seems to be quite rare.  I was given R. arcticus a couple of years ago, but it turned out to be white-flowered R. saxatilis (Rock Bramble), a common species here in drier habitats and actually a wild plant in part of my garden. A wild hybrid between saxatilis and arcticus is also known here. Pictures of saxatilis below. The fruit is rather seedy and it’s not often one finds enough fruit to gather.

[cohan]

i can see why that plant could be confused with arcticus, out of flower..

here are the plants i was talking about-first clear R pubescens, then growing very near them (this is just behind my house) the plants which have the general size and flower shape of pubescens, but the leaves look rather like arcticus, and flowers have a bit of pink.. could be a natural hybrid? i will have to go look at them again and see if any of the foliar differences disappear once they are in full growth... note: pubescens can have white to pinkish flrs, so that is not a diagnostic point...
1-4 Rubus pubescens
5-7 Rubus ?
8 a visitor on Petasites

[cohan]

my first bike trip of the year was on june 06; not really far (about 14miles in a sort of rectangle), and not too exciting (i was looking for dodecatheon, but didn't find any on that day) still, it was  a lovely day, great to be out on the road, and some nice views around my area..
1 that's a grader-road maintenance, up ahead--determined to churn up the gravel and make my cycling much harder!
2,3-the white fields in this view are grain stubble from last year; the yellow are dandelions!
4- a very different view on another road; wet areas to each side, mixed forest ahead..
5,6-an odd little curving road nearer home, not far from the site where i photographed Castilleja etc last year..

[cohan]

same day;
1-4- at the Castilleja site (not flowering yet then, they are now, i photographed a few yesterday!) the woodlands rich and green, flowering plants just starting...
5,6- Aralia nudicaulis; some plants just emerging, and just in bud in early june; growing with:
7-Viola canadensis; a purer white flower here than the plants near my house.

[David Nicholson]

Cohan, I do so enjoy looking at your Alberta wanderings, please keep 'em coming.

[cohan]

1,2 on the way back home, just up the road--look to the end of the road where it comes to a T, my place is at the right behind/inside the bush...
3-5 Prunus pensylvanica
along the top of the hill from the previous shots, are several prunus, virginiana and the only pensylvanica i know of around here (there are bound to be more, but not easy to find out of flower if they aren't in the open like these.. these beautiful small trees are at risk from a misguided local program to spray 'weeds' and woodies in the roadsides... so far these ones have escaped, but a few smaller ones not far away didn't make it..

[cohan]

Cohan, I do so enjoy looking at your Alberta wanderings, please keep 'em coming.

thanks david living out here has some challenges-at least for an urbanised farm boy like me but when i get out on some of those empty roads, i do count myself lucky

[Gerdk]

same day;
1-4- at the Castilleja site (not flowering yet then, they are now, i photographed a few yesterday!) the woodlands rich and green, flowering plants just starting...
5,6- Aralia nudicaulis; some plants just emerging, and just in bud in early june; growing with:
7-Viola canadensis; a purer white flower here than the plants near my house.

Cohan,
Quite interesting to have a look at a side where Viola canadensis grows -
My own plants have a lesser part of yellow inside the flowers but seemed to be of a larger size (the plants-not the flowers).
What tree/shrub is pic no. 4  ?   Is it a Corylus?

Gerd

[cohan]

same day;
1-4- at the Castilleja site (not flowering yet then, they are now, i photographed a few yesterday!) the woodlands rich and green, flowering plants just starting...
5,6- Aralia nudicaulis; some plants just emerging, and just in bud in early june; growing with:
7-Viola canadensis; a purer white flower here than the plants near my house.

Cohan,
Quite interesting to have a look at a side where Viola canadensis grows -
My own plants have a lesser part of yellow inside the flowers but seemed to be of a larger size (the plants-not the flowers).
What tree/shrub is pic no. 4  ?   Is it a Corylus?

Gerd

gerd-the violas here are usually growing in a zone-forest edge/open mixed forest-which has very heavy competition among the forbs and small shrubs, so i think it likely would grow bigger in the garden! it is our largest violet, and is maybe up to around 30cm average here, though my book says it could be to 60cm; it is usually in quite thick vegetation of other plants, and probably only a few stems per plant..
i have some more pictures of this species to post--some of those by my house and another colony i found with the distinctly pinkish flowers..

as for the shrub in pic 4, i think it should be Alnus sp; these are not rare, but not abundant, so i am not as familiar with them as some other shrubs/trees; it seems to me that these are extra popular with deer/moose as they  seem to be pruned ruthlessly, often.. on the other hand, i don't usually get to these spots early enough in the year to see the catkins for a final id--i don't think Corylus quite makes it into my area, but sometimes the mapmakers are wrong!

[Paul T]

Cohan,

Thanks for the tours of your area.  Some interesting stuff in there.  Here's hoping that those areas that are regenerating after prolonged overgrazing will once more produce the plants that they used to.  Maybe they still need to overgrow a bit further yet before conditions are right.  It is amazing what can reappear at old sites ones favourable conditions return.  Fingers crossed. 

Thanks again.

[cohan]

Cohan,

Thanks for the tours of your area.  Some interesting stuff in there.  Here's hoping that those areas that are regenerating after prolonged overgrazing will once more produce the plants that they used to.  Maybe they still need to overgrow a bit further yet before conditions are right.  It is amazing what can reappear at old sites ones favourable conditions return.  Fingers crossed.  

Thanks again.

thanks, paul....
as for overgrazed spots where the d****d buttercup has got a hold, i don't know if there is any going back, other than chemicals which kill everything but grass... other areas that are just grazed low have no problem regenerating..

land use is always complicated, i guess, or at least in this area--without removing the vast majority of humans from the equation, you can't go back to  a completely 'natural' flora; in this area, if we removed cultivation and heavy grazing, everything would revert to forest, so all the plants that need open, sunny spots would be pushed out..
in the original state, open areas would be created by blow downs or fires, which (fires esp) tend to be prevented by modern humans! open areas also exist farther away from the mountains at prairie's edge, but that area tends to be even more heavily agriculturalised...
anyway, we can't turn back the clock, so at least this area has a patchwork of different land uses that allow many species to exist, but any of the individual plots is always subject to sudden change/obliteration..

[cohan]

some of you have seen the pinkish Viola canadensis which grows wild near my house; some other populations here are whiter (and some variation within the population), and i have found another site with these pink flowered plants..
my camera has a bit of trouble with red tones, but i think i managed to fairly accurately capture the tone of these flowers..
included are a couple of shots of the habitat, as mentioned to gerd, you can see they have lots of competition: maianthemum, pyrolas, petasites ground level in the shade of the other plants, epilobium, asters, mertensia, vicia, lathyrus, galium etc, plus numerous woodies- lonicera, symphoricarpos, rosa, viburnum, shepherdia, etc