If you believe the calendar, spring begins on March 20, but if you garden in Seattle you know that spring begins in February. This year it has been unseasonably, freakishly warm. The lack of snow in the mountains is worrisome. But even in an average year, if such a thing exists, the dormant season here is short and it starts to warm up in February. Weeds that double as salad greens, like shot weed (Cardamine hirsuta) and chickweed (Stellaria media) are flowering now and the shot weed is already setting seeds in sunnier spots.
Cardamine hirsuta (shot weed, hairy bittercress) tastes like watercress and it’s free and accessible in the city. Look down, you’re probably stepping on it.
Stellaria media (chickweed) fills the bare soil in your garden and makes a nice salad green whose taste is sometimes compared to corn silk, in a good way.
But there’s a lot more breaking into leaf and flowering. Here’s a sampling from around the garden this week.
Oemleria cerasiformis (Indian plum) around Cascara Circle. It’s easy to miss most of the year but easy to spot now because so little else is flowering. Look for it in the untended green space around the city, where native plants coexist with exotics from around the world.
Mahonia aquifolium ( Oregon grape) flowers ready to open any day. When they do, stop to smell them. You won’t be disappointed.
Garrya elliptica (wavyleaf silktassel) in Cascara Circle is used as a muscle relaxant among other things but it is also a great, broadleaved evergreen with beautiful, long, male catkins, hence the name silktassel. Female plants have shorter, less showy catkins but they have the benefit of producing seeds if they get pollinated by nearby flowers on a male plant.
Aristolochia californica (California Dutchman’s pipe) section D. Like the Indian plum and Cornelian cherry, the California Dutchman’s pipe flowers precede the emergence of new foliage.
Chamaedaphne calyculata (leatherleaf) north of Cascara Circle.
Cornus mas (Cornelian cherry) section B border. The fruit of Cornelian cherry are oblong, cherry red and delicious when they turn purple and soft. I like to pick them up off the ground so that I know they are fully ripe. They are extremely tart and astringent when even slightly unripe, but the ripe fruit has a complex and delightful flavor, cherished by Eurasians, though still underappreciated in the USA.
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Mandragora officinarum (European mandrake) section E. Also in section E is Podophyllum peltatum (American mandrake or mayapple) which emerges from dormancy a little later. They’re in different plant families, the former in the Solanaceae and the latter in the Berberidaceae, but the similarity of the fruit, poisonous when hard and green but edible when soft, yellow and fragrant (according to some adventurous authorities; many consider European mandrake poisonous at all times) is likely what earned the American mandrake its name.
Wasabia japonica (wasabi) section E. No, it’s not growing next to a crystal clear stream in the dewy mountains of Japan but it is wasabi and it is doing well. You can grow it outside in rich and somewhat shady soil in Seattle.
watching the seasons
inscrutable as fortune
coming into view
See you in the garden.