New Year Ferns and Fungus

Hiking Windy Hill - California Buckye In Bloom

California Buckeye is in business on Windy Hill * serving up fragrant blooms to hikers, native bees and butterflies, like the Pale Swallowtail butterfly. This shrubby tree, found over much of the Western United States, is a great wilderness plant counted on by many natives. Before European contact, it was also a food source for native peoples, following an extensive toxic leaching process.

It's not a good neighbor in the  suburbs, however,  since there it may come into contact with non-native bees. That's because it's pollen, though extremely appealing to the European immigrant bees, is toxic to them.

So . . . we love it, but we don't plant it.
*Windy Hill is close to - Silicon Valley, Within the San Francisco Bay Area , is  nearby the 280 freeway

On my Flower-Lovin' Hiker's Bookshelf

              

Hiking Windy Hill: Wild Cream Colored Iris

California Native Wildflower - A Creamy Douglassi Iris 

Our California spring wildflowers are blooming like gangbusters at Windy Hill right now. The pooches and kids are enjoying themselves there too. You have to know where to go when you want to hike locally with your dog, and Windy Hill is a great place to take your best friend. Just make sure you choose the trail that's signed for dogs. There are no signs for children, so you can interpret that however you please.

Among the flowers we saw -  red columbine, brilliant blue hounds tongue, milk white hellebore, deep purple lupine, and plenty of pale rosy pink spring vetch in flower on a lovely, warm 7 mile hike yesterday.  I'd never seen the creamy version of douglassi iris I photographed above before. I double checked and found that it does occasionally occur in creamy shades and also hybridizes easily.

Another example of diversity in California!


              

The Wake-Robin: Three is Magic (Hiking Windy Hill)

Trillium or Wake-Robin

Spring is, indeed, bustin' out all over at Windy Hill Preserve in the Mid-Penninsula Regional Open Space.

An encounter with the three perfect white petals and trinity of glossy leaves in this small white trillium, or Wake-Robin, is a great way to exit the day-to-day and head for another realm.

When it comes to trilliums, it's easy to accept that three really is a magic number.

Oh Baby, it's a Wild World

We all gotta come to terms with it. 

Sometimes the world is a little wilder than others.

Fungus Amongus: The Pink Ones Are Toxic

Hiking Windy Hill 

Click on the toxic princess above

to really enjoy the details

But don't touch, 

if you run into  her on a post-rain hike

As was hoped for, we got a bit of those storms the Oregonians were so kind as to send down our way. Two guesses as to what quick crop the rain brings out in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I chatted with a mushroom gathering fella close to the end of my hike at Windy Hill Open Space Preserve today. You aren't actually supposed to gather mushrooms in the Open Space, but what do you say? My husband saw another couple at the top of the hill with collecting bags as well. Hopefully enough people are concerned about the possibility of eating the wrong 'shroom that the area doesn't get stripped of it's fungus-bearing potential.

This man was gathering mushrooms under an oak tree. I asked him about this pink beauty I'd snapped on my camera phone further up the hill. He knew just the spot she grew.

"Oh those are very toxic," he said in an English thick with a mellifluous some-kinda-European accent I couldn't place. "They are so toxic that if you even touch them with your fingers, the toxins will enter your bloodstream and .... " he made a vague gesture as to where I might now be, had I had the nerve to perhaps prop up this little pink-topped native plant to enhance her photographic possibilities. The location of his casual gesture was somewhere down the side of the trail in a rather steep ravine.

Don't eat the pink ones.

Foetid Adder's Tongue: If I was a fly...

Click on the Pulgas Ridge Foetid Adder's Tongue illustration above

For a fly's eye view 

If I was a fly
I'd think I had died,
And was on my way to heaven


'Cause what could smell more delicious to me, 
 as I'm sensing along with my micro antennae,
then the rotting aroma of Scoliopus bigelovii?


Though they say I resemble a serpent's tongue, 
That's not what brings the fellas on,
My lovely putriferous odor's the charm.