Fragments From Floyd

My initial and most lasting impression of our first experience of the Pacific Northwesst Temperate Rain Forest was, not surprisingly, the vegetation. And once again, I look back and acknowledge how much richer my life has been for my eleventh hour conversion from zoology to botany long ago. I never thought I'd get to see a temperate rain forest--a completely different biome and as much like a visit to another planet as I'll ever have.

Yes, we saw a few animals in Vancouver, but we were immersed in an amazingly rich alien botany that was not entirely a mystery to me. I could readily see relationships that tied this new world of plant life to the one I knew in the Appalachian forests of home. I've since confirmed most of my guesses: I've gotten the families right, and in most cases, even the genus. Relatives of our foamflower, spring beauty, lily of the valley, hemlock, dogwood...the list is long. This seems, I know, a small thing to you perhaps, but these affinities between my world and that far-off planet give me a sense of wholeness--a Whole Earthness--that confers a belonging to this achingly beautiful and complex creation.

I would have been thankful for some field guides, but there really wasn't enough time (or dry weather) to indulge, and my traveling companions wouldn't have thought plant ID was very much fun as I would have. It would have been nice to have had my laptop; my notes would have been much richer than the scribble jots on my little hip pocket notebook.

The most astounding thing about this plant life was its size. I attribute this to the ample supply of moisture and to the generally moderate temperatures affected by the warm Pacific currents. But then, there is Bergman's Rule that I remember from college days that says as you go north, species size tends to increase. This holds for animals (body mass and heat production and such) but I don't think it really applies to plants. But that's for later contemplation. I digress.

Familiar things--rhododendrons, hastas, bracken ferns--were multiples of the same species here at home. A single rhododendron flower was 6 inches across, and bracken was as tall as my shoulder! There were dogwoods (genus Cornus, different species from here at home) that were 40 feet tall and a foot across. We saw hemlocks (western, not the doomed eastern species), with striking similarities to ours in the young trees, but the mature trees grow tall and limbless, and are not all dying. And cedars--typically small pasture invaders here--are massive, wonderfully fragrant giants. I found myself just wanting to lay my hands on the trunks of the largest trees, as if I could absorb their history, their antiquity and power through my fingertips and hear a hymn of the earth.

Foxglove (four feet tall!) is a predominant understory plant, and was just before blooming along the forest edges on Bowen when we were there. And the Salmonberry (obviously a form of Rubus, or raspberry whose early fruits are pale orange, the color of salmon flesh) were just beginning to set fruit. Ferns grow in the absolute shade of the forest floor where enormous trees grow from the fallen bodies or stumps of their predecessors, age upon age. And the ferns are huge: a single Sword Fern plant (I could tell at first glance it was a relative of our little Christmas Fern, and turns out to be in the same genus) can be taller than my head, a single plant spreading to cover 50 square feet. This species is amazingly efficient at covering every square foot of understory in many places--a sea of fernery, a wonderful monotony I could not capture in the dim light, but have stored in the film of memory.

(The image above is Bigleaf Maple--a massive tree, its opposite leaves a foot across.)