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Prairies in Reverse

© Gregg Pasterick

I didn't know much about the Pacific Northwest before I moved here. In fact, I knew very little. I had notions. I had expectations. I had my idea of what the Pacific Northwest was ... Bigfoot, impenetrable coniferous forests, rare owls and tree-huggers and middle-aged former SLA terrorists, Mt. St. Helens and Mt Rainier, D. B. Cooper, Starbuck's, rain. Rain, rain, rain. A little of all of that proved to be true, but still there were surprises.

One surprise was the high desert. The eastern side of Washington and Oregon is a desert. It gets dry and dusty and hot. I had no idea.

Another surprise was the prairies. There are prairies here. Imagine that. But these prairies are different from their east-of-the-Rockies counterparts. These prairies bloom in the spring, not during mid- and late-summer.

One such prairie is an area south of Puget Sound, and is known as Puget Prairie. Not the endless grassland of the central U.S., it's an area more like Adams County, Ohio, where prairie species grow with weedy abandon along roadsides, and a few natural areas have been set aside to preserve an example of what the environment was before agriculture and bulldozers and concrete.

Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve and Scatter Creek Wildlife Refuge are two of these areas. By the time my wife and I had settled into our new digs on the coast and were able to visit the prairies, peak bloom had come and gone. Regardless, we still saw a nice variety of wildflowers. There were several lupine species (which will be the topic of a future article), yellow and blue violets, Common Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia), Graceful Cinquefoil (Potentilla gracilis), Twinflower (Linnaea borealis), lots of Nuttall's Larkspur (Delphinium nuttalli) at Scatter Creek, and our first Columbia Tiger Lilies (Lilium Columbianum).

A couple weeks later, we made a trip to Willow Creek Meadow, which is a wet prairie west of Eugene, OR. Yes, we missed the peak bloom, but we were not only treated to a nice variety of wildflowers, we saw several new species, as well as some endangered and threatened stuff. In fact, it was a threatened lupine and a threatened butterfly that lured us so far south into Oregon (something else that will be written about in a few weeks.) Some of the species we saw included Elegant Downingia (Downingia elegans), Harvest Brodiaea (Brodiaea coronaria), Native Self-heal (Prunella vulgaris var. lanceolata), Slender Cinquefoil (Potentilla gracilis var garcilis), and Rosy Owl's Clover (Orthocarpus bracteosus) (I think I have an owl's clover and paintbrush article or two in me). The endangered or threatened species included Willamette Daisy (Erigeron decumbens), White-top Aster (Aster curtus), Bradshaw's Lomatium (Lomatium bradshawii), and Kincaid's Lupine (Lupinus sulphureus).

Mima Mounds

Columbia Lily

Willow Creek

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