I’ve heard Scotch Broom is invasive but is it also difficult remove? I’m guessing yes. Here Pampas grass is something you want no part of. Deep, huge and tough roots which can grow back from anything you miss. Still, people do love it as I confess to as well for its scale, form and flowers though most gardens are too small for it and besides the leaves are as tough and abrasive as bandsaw blades. But it does make an impression.
It grows at our favorite San Francisco beach walk …
… and up in Fort Bragg, near one of my favorite botanical gardens.
While I’ve never been the least bit tempted to grow it myself I have got a smaller relative in my back garden whose flowers I remove religiously.
I greatly admire your work removing invasives. I’m past the point where I can do the same but I am very grateful to those who can and do help the effort.
Pulling only works for those with stems about pencil size or smaller; once a plant if four feet tall with a stem the thickness of a AA battery the roots go three feet deep and pulling them requires a special tool that IMO isn’t worth the effort.
I don’t know if that’s on Oregon’s invasives list or not . . . gotta go look.
Interesting: ordinary pampas grass isn’t listed, but its giant cousin purple pampas grass is. I know of a few clumps of the former in the area but not the larger. The ordinary variety gets maybe three meters tall here, but the giant stuff can reach twice that.
I recall seeing clumps of the ordinary kind along a beach creek suitable for canoeing, down on the southern coast, but despite a clump shedding millions of seeds every year it was only a few clumps that were a dozen years old, so apparently it just doesn’t like Oregon coastal weather.
Leaf shape, leaf color since some are evergreen and some turn brown, some have yellow but not red and so on. If it has thistles on it or not. If it has buds on it or not. If the base has a leaf cut its shape also.
It’s most likely a Burr Oak. Quercus bicolors. Assuming there are not thistles on the tip. Though it could be a Swamp White Oak. I’m not sure how wide their leaf shapes diverge.
I’d call it palmate if a palm can have seven fingers. It was definitely a pale brown, no red, possibly some light yellow tint near the edges. No thistles, no buds.
Swamp white oak leaves look similar, but this one had pointy lobes like a maple.
I suppose I ought to take Knox for a walk that way again and find some leaves to bring back for pictures.
No picture, drat it, but I saw a new bird in the neighborhood this morning. It was odd to a large degree because there were no other birds around – none of the usual crows or finches or even starlings – which made me think that perhaps they were giving it plenty of space.
It looked kind of like a young hawk of some sort, definitely young judging by the fluffy off-white breast feathers, but the head seemed rather small. I hope it comes back when I have my phone handy and can snap an image; I know we’ve had a new species of eagle move in over the last ten years and at least one new species of hawk, and it would be fun to know if this is one of the newcomers.
Forgot to post this days ago before the storm dumped sixteen inches of rain (or more) on us in four days: just as the storms first little wisps of could were drifting in there was a flock of geese overhead, headed for the bay. Except it wasn’t just one flight in the usual V, it was flight after flight after flight. I estimated the numbers at five to six thousand, the largest batch of geese traveling together I’ve ever seen.
Yep, the leaves on our burr oak are all second growth, as the tree lost nearly all its leaves this summer in the heat and drought, then put out a smaller number in second growth when I got some water on it, with those leaves being smaller than usual.
Take that lower leaf and run a strip up the twig to it’s all connected and thus palmate instead of pinnate. Then make the lobes the same length and put points on the ends of the lobes, and it’s a good approximation of what I saw.
It’s a bit stormy today so I’m not likely to take Knox on a walk very far, but if there’s a break in the weather I’ll see if I can find one of those.
Reading on them I learned that there are actually two different species called burr oak, Quercus macrocarpa and Quercus bicolors.
This is the macrocarpa–
and this is the bicolors–
The big one JPM posted actually looks more like Quercus alba–
The native oak here is Quercus garryana–
The USDA says it’s not native to the coast, but I’ve seen it enough anywhere from Camp Rilea on the north and Bandon to the south that I disagree.
I got a chuckle when I saw that a species I invented for a short story – blue oak – actually exists; it’s Quercus douglasii–
and it can hybridize with garryana. It’s called blue oak due to its leaves, though; my story’s blue oak is due to pale blue wood.
For what it’s worth, this is from one of our native maple trees, Acer macrophyllum–
It doesn’t help that we have at least two species of Japanese maple grown commonly in yards, the most common being Acer palmatum, which itself comes in several floral varieties–
The partial tree on the left, the reddish one behind it, the orange in the foreground, and the green in the background are all palmatum – that’s what happens when a species is bred for floral appeal.
There are a lot of oaks and many of them have very similar leaves. In my county alone there is 20+ species of oaks. In Alabama there is roughly 39 species of oaks and there are just shy of 100 species of oaks in USA taking up about 1/5th of the species worldwide. If you have a flora map of your state it may list what all species are there.
Also many species of trees escape cultivation as exotics in residential and commercial areas and become invasive. Where I live the the popcorn “Chinese tallow” tree is found everywhere. Even 10+ miles out away from the nearest house or road. But it’s a non native species brought over to USA in the early 1800s I believe.
Just beautiful in a stunningly somber way. Yesterday we drove to the Santa Cruz Arboretum which is known for their “Large assemblages of plants from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and California natives are displayed on the grounds”. This time we only walked in the the Australian Garden which is my favorite. The foreignness of the foliage and flowers make it easier to see them with fresh eyes rather than as ‘one of those’. Here are a few of my favorite visual takes.
When I took Knox out before bedtime tonight there was mist overhead. When I looked up to where Jupiter should be, there was something I’d never seen before: Jupiter with a halo like the moon has sometimes except no color, just a tiny pale ring around a fuzzy bright spot.
The winter sky is amazing. Most of the constellations I know are out and the when not hazy, the cold dry air makes seeing stars easy. I understand the next few nights have a nice meteor shower, if you are up in the middle of night.
I don’t know if it’s my vision or if we just have increased light pollution here, but many stars aren’t visible, so I can’t even find most of the familiar constellations.
I recall back when I was working with Boy Scouts taking a bunch to camp out on a hill surrounded mostly by trees, in a research pasture at the university, for the express purpose of watching the Geminids, while watching one of the guys noticed a slow-moving object and pointed it out; I counted off seconds as it transited fifteen degrees of sky and predicted when it would come around again – it was a satellite in a polar orbit, so another of the guys promptly proclaimed it must be a spy satellite. They later noticed a satellite traveling WSW to ENE, which could have been anything (being young teens, they of course decided to moon the spy satellite). Anyway, at the peak of the night we counted eight or nine ‘shooting stars’ a minute.
I’m going to hope for clear skies tonight, though given our light pollution (and/or my vision) issue I might miss most of them anyway.
