Island Year by Hazel Heckman

Author:Hazel Heckman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295805511
Publisher: University of Washington Press

Broom and Hardhack

By mid-May, the blossoms that had opened on Scotch broom, a naturalized pest from the Mediterranean for which the Scots are blamed, had spread a golden blanket over countless acres in the Pacific Northwest. We do not have a great deal of broom here on the Island. Not enough land has been cleared, and farmers have been ruthless in its extraction, but during a mild year almost any month will see a few of the pea-shaped yellow flowers on sharply angled, nearly leafless stems.

May brings a massed flood. Cytisus scoparius, called “whin” in England, prefers poor soil to rich. When the head of our household flew north and west in May of 1946 to stake out territory, he reported back that Northwest hills carpeted with broom, as seen from the air, resembled “sloping platters of scrambled eggs.” On a clear May day, hills across the channel glow a golden yellow. Seen from close up, orange-red stamens produce an odd light.

Grubbed out or burned off, broom comes back tough and resistant, blooms, and sets hairy pods. In the fall the ripened pods burst with popping sounds, hurling prolific seeds like buckshot in every direction, producing a population explosion that outdoes the best efforts of any native flora save the rampant blackberry to thrive and multiply.

Another shrub beginning to bloom in May is hardhack or (more aptly) steeple bush, Spiraea douglasii, a pretty, moisture-loving specimen we planted in our gardens in Oklahoma and nurtured tenderly because of the fluffy pink spires of bloom that would appear in summer. Driving west across Montana and northern Idaho in the summer of 1946 on my first trip to the Northwest, I was amazed to see dense clumps and marching lines of this tall shrub we had known as “pink spiraea” growing wild along the draws. Here on the Island I found the same silver-pink steeples arising from wet road ditches and bordering the fresh-water lakes.

They tell an interesting story of an Oregon suburbanite who gave a midwestern mail-order nursery a carte blanche order for suitable shrubs to landscape his newly purchased lots. The shrubs arrived, leafless and carefully packed, and were planted. When spring came and his landscape leafed, he was chagrined to discover that his massed background planting was identical with the wild profusion of shrubs in the fresh-water marsh that bordered the back of his place, a veritable jungle of hardhack, labeled Spiraea douglasii on his little tags.

The ditches along and between the bays were a fascinating world in May, a rich mixture of plant and animal life, of dark red salamanders and tiny green frogs, of Mayflies, stoneflies, and green and gold dragonflies. New heads appeared on the tall thin stems of cat-tails, where red-winged blackbirds hung their woven cup nests, and yellow Mimulus, bright flowers with monkey faces, sprawled among weak-stemmed brooklime.

In full leaf by May, horsetail forests crowded wet road shoulders along with starry clubs of skunk cabbage like fallen warriors among the yellowing leaves. Fertile fronds of horsetail shook out green pollen.

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