The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
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First week of June 2019
Pacific Northwest
Wild roses are in peak bloom this week. The luxuriant abundance of soft color and intense fragrance will fade over the next couple of weeks, with nothing but miles of thorny thickets left behind (though very occasionally, after a rainfall a faint scent of rose wafts up from wet foliage reminding us of this brief flowering season). But everywhere I go right now it’s roses and more roses, of every hue of pink, delicate curvy petals, rosy fragrance, each bloom unique, slowing my pace to breathe and delight in them.
Roses stir all our senses and evoke pleasure. The intensity of that feeling has lifted roses into the heaven of our regard and it’s no wonder roses are traditionally a symbol of love.
Poets write about them —
it’s love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.
*
(from: “Hum” from New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, © 2007 by Mary Oliver – Beacon Press)
Songs too. Everyone gets what Robbie Burns means in this poignant declaration of love, here sung by Eddi Reader, Scots herself.
Roses come in all colors of course, especially the many thousands of cultivated varieties. Burns’ Scottish red roses bloom in June while our Pacific Northwest pink roses newly bloom more in late May, but a rose is a rose is a rose.
While I’ve been lingering along the thickets lately I’ve been enjoying the variations this year. The vast majority of our wild roses are Nootka rose (biology.burke.washington.edu/...), a native shrub that is exceptionally well-adapted to sunny open areas — fields, roadsides, seashores, backyards — and the poor-quality soil of our glacially scraped islands which dries rock hard in summer. Wild roses like more benign conditions too but I suspect their tolerance for drought is why they outcompete other shrubs here, where annual precipitation is as low as 18”. Rose thorniness deters any serious browsing by deer and it spreads aggressively by underground rhizomes. You can mow, hack, trim as much as you want and it just laughs at you. I don’t dare walk barefoot in my yard anymore after being punctured by thorns too many times which broke off and festered for weeks.
And yet, these briefly flowering blooms make all that worthwhile. We celebrate these few lovely weeks of early summer.
You might think that since the buds are red, a flower gets lighter as it unfolds. In fact full blown Nootka roses can be any shade of pink, and there isn’t any pattern I can see. Inside the cup of petals are the many yellow stamens (male parts, producing pollen), and the stigma at the very center (female part that receives pollen for fertilization). The stigma can be any shade from yellow to pink. There can be any combination of petals and centers, dark or light.
Petals and stigmas:
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I thought perhaps as a flower matures it doesn’t just open its petals and darken its stamens (from light yellow to orangish), but might it also darken the stigma? Turns out there isn’t a pattern there either. See the examples below:
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So maybe there’s just a lot of variability in rose colors, full stop. The array of blooms in a thicket gives one lots of opportunity to gaze upon that variety.
Nootka roses aren’t the only wild roses here. Their shy cousin the Baldhip rose is far less abundant as it prefers shadier conditions under tree canopy and there’s more open habitat than forest hereabouts. The Baldhip leaves and flowers are smaller, and its thorns are shorter, though more densely packed. Buds are smaller and the “hips” below will be more oval than the roundish Nootka hips. Both roses start blooming at about the same time.
The open cup-shaped flowers of wild roses with their sexual organs exposed to the air are welcoming to a variety of pollinators. Bees, beetles, flies and other insects can walk around on the stamens and stigmas, as we can see several beetles doing in the closeup below. Beetles have been pollinators since ancient times, and they prefer open exposed scented flowers (www.fs.fed.us/...). Roses are an ancient plant family (www.nature.com/...), well suited to them. This page (www.fs.fed.us/...) has an interesting chart showing what flower shapes and features have coevolved with different kinds of pollinators.
Once pollinated, the flowers drop their come-hither petals and the stamens shrivel up because inside the ovary below there’s been fertilization. Seeds will develop there and later in the season that bulbous structure will become a reddish rose hip.
Over this past week I’ve been starting to see more spent flowers than buds. The peak bloom is passing, faster than I’d like. Where once there were pink fragrant blossoms everywhere I walk, too soon they will be replaced by reddish hips which will hang on, some of them all the way through next winter.
Until then I will bury my nose in lovely fragrant rose flowers.
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Partly sunny skies in the Pacific Northwest islands. We’ve been having occasional showers and some dramatic layered clouds, an upside to “unsettled weather”. Temps have been cooler than normal this week.
What’s the nature news in your neighborhood?
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