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Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA *** by Brad Smith Last summer my frien Pat, my brother Eric, and I went hiking above Yosemite Valley, where we discovered snow plants. We had never seen them before, and their curious color and shape fascinated us. By the time we left the mountains, we had a lot of photographs and a lot of curiosity. Back in Los Angeles, the UCLA Library satisfied much of our curiosity, largely replacing it with wonder. If you are in the right place at the right time, you can't miss the snow plants. They are incredibly bright red little shoots that pop up all over the forest floor in the spring, especiallly where the humus is thick. Their scientific name, Sarcodes sanguinea--"bloody flesh--is grotesquely appropriate. Snow plants range from the mountains of Southern California to the Cascades in Oregon. They seem to prefer the darkest woods--the same sort of places the bears like--in the snow forests: the (Page ONE of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont.)yellow pine, red fir, and lodgepole pine belts, at altitudes from 4,000 to 8,000 feet. They like to live with the sequois and firs that grow in these forests, and after you find them growing near snowbanks. At one time snow plants were believed to be parasites, attaching themselves to and drawing nourishment from roots of trees. But they are not parasites living on live plants: they are saprophytes, living on dead or decaying organic matter. Thus they utilize the energy remaining in the rotting litter of the forest and do not obtain it directly from sunlight as most plants do. Therefore, they don't need chlorophyll to manufacture food from sunlight, which is why they are not green. The red color of snow plants may be a relic of a time when they did use the little sun that filters in deep shade are red. A red surface absorbs green light, which is all that gets through to the bottom of the jungle or a dense(Page TWO of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont)forest, and red pigmentation seems to be nonfunctional. Snow plants don't have leaves, either, in the usual sense. A saprophyte doesn't need leaves. Snow plants have a succulent stem, six to twelve inches long, covered with scaly remnants of leaves and bell shaped flowers--each one-half to three-quarters of an inch long, with five broad, spreading lobes. Actually, snow plants are mostly root, because they get their living underground. It's what goes on out of sight that is most important to them, what we see is only in response to the underground environment. Snow plants are related to other saprophytes such as the pale, ghostly Indian pipe of other regions. Indians used to utilize the dried and powdered plants as medication for sores and toothaches, but, used incorrectly, it is reportedly poisonous. In many ways snow plants fill a niche similar to mushrooms, which also live on decaying matter.(Page THREE of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont)However, mushrooms live in damp forests, wheras snow plants live in relatively dry forests, although they are particularly sensitive to moisture. Their food suppply is in the upper layers of the soil, and most of the year where snow plants live these layers are either dry or covered with snow. Autumn brings some rain, but snows and freezing winds follow unpredictably and quickly. In spring when the snows are melting and the weather is warming, snow plants pop up near melting snow banks, the water encourages their growth. The bloom of snow plants follows the snow-melt as it recedes back into the dark forest and up to higher altitudes as spring progresses. Usually they appear at about the time the bears awake from hibernation and the mosquitoes hatch in bogs formed by melt-swollen streams. Because they are flowering plants--and presumably evolved from plants that turned sunlight, not humus, into food--the snow(Page FOUR of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont)plants' roots have adapted to a curious relationship. They have no root hairs--the tiny structures that absorb nutrients for most plants. Perhaps root hairs are not efficient enough to absorb all the food a saprophyte needs. Instead, their roots are covered by a sheath of fungus that grows down betreen the outer cells of the roots--never deeper than the first layer, and never actually into the cells. The fungi absorb nourishment from the soil, and the snow plants absorb their food from the fungi. What the fungi get out of the bargain isn't clear. Why don't they just set up shop on their own? Snow plants cannot support fungi alone, so the fungi rely on the snow plants for moisture through much of the year. The seeds of snow plants ripen in August after the flowers and stalks are faded. Like the seeds of many other saprophytes, the snow plant seeds are very small (less than a millimeter long), and (Page FIVE of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont)they contain very little stored food, but there are a lot of them. There would be no point in being supplied with extra food, because if they land in a favorable spot, they don't have to reach up to the sun to absorb energy. If they land in a unfavorable place--on a rock, say--they will not survive anyway, so stored food to tide them over is pointless. Nature is seldom inefficient. At the same time that the seeds are ripening in the open air, the roots are growing underground. As fall approaches, the roots form new tiny shoots in preparation for next spring, when they can pop up at the first sign of moisture in the soil. Although they don't actually push up through the snow, they can appear before most other plants--often before the last winter storm arrives and drops more snow around them. It's easy to see how the snow plant aquired its common name.(Page SIX of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont) Next time you're hiking in the western mountains and you encounter a snow plant, examine it closely--then take a wider view. If you observe with knowing senses, you can see snow melting, and humus rotting, and sunlight warming earth, and bears, and mosquitoes, and--maybe a little bit of yourself.(Page SEVEN of SEVEN)
Flower Plants
Magenta mariposa
Flowers
Azaleas (pinkish) Castelleia Culbertsone 1/2 cine (s)last 1/2 1956 (s)
Flowers
Pink Azalea Bush *** & El Capitan in background(also Biveil)
Flowers
Azaleas **+
Flowers
Azalea (save first) **Pink & blue sky
Flowers
Azaleas1. Mass, 1/2 dome background2. Mass--mound3. Mass, Sentinel background
Flowers
Scarlet MimulusTorreyi Mimulus
Flowers
Miscellaneouswildflowers
Flowers
Pink Mimulus ***C.U.
Flowers
Mallow
Flowers
GrapevineLupine
Flowers
Lupin--three kinds