CPTC's Pink Star of the Woods

Spring may or may not have arrived in Lakewood. There are hopeful signs, and one of them is a tiny flower resting comfortably in the dappled sunlight beneath the Garry Oak Grove's canopy at the college outdoor lab.

Above: the intersection of the uplands, where Dr. Faust's students collaborate on where they're going to tackle the blackberries and Scotch Broom. Or if you're one of Kathy Smith's students, drop dead because you failed her summer simulations with dangerous, dangerous materials. Again.

See the Garry Oaks? This is what you want to see for spring:

Maybe you've glanced across the street and seen Dr. Faust and his students mapping shade with CPTC densiometers (humble-looking, simply designed, efficient and very expensive): Env Sci Tech watchers should look out for students traveling in groups; standing under at least some tree cover; they'll be trying to hold level some strange little flip-top wooden boxes like compasses. Expect to see much frowning into them as though they hold all the secrets of the internet. Or, squinting up into the trees with abstracted expressions of mathematical pontification. I've been one of these students and we all look like denizens of an alternative steampunk universe, consulting our wood-cased pocket-watches and wondering why the Pierce Transit Zeppelin #48 is so late.

If you can't shell out the $100+ for one of these tools, you can download apps to your phone, like Canopeo or Canopy Capture. They do come in handy, but if you're serious about forest survey, agricultural tech, or even a nice fat landscaping commission...you'll be cutting your teeth on the analog version with Dr. Faust. This is the same one sold by forestry suppliers for measuring shade density and wetlands delineations.

The percentage of sunlight passing through our Garry Oak branches is absolutely vital. When you're looking for our native wildflowers, success may depend on your knowing if they like the edge of the tree's shadeline... (official term, 'forest overstory density) or full exposure.

Spring emergent wildflowers have a skinny little window of bloom-time that exists roughly between the time when we get finally get enough warm weather to wake them up...and it ends after the full leaf-out. Believe me, it happens fast. One minute everything is nice and skeletal...and then after a few days of warm rain and sun the whole grove sounds like popcorn--the buds in the oaks are popping out!

It's not that the shade will kill the wildflowers--outside of bloom time most of them thrive in it. They just need this sunlight for a specific amount of time. It's all tied in with soil temperature, light for photosynthesizing those pesky sugars needed to produce nectar, and being a polite host to all those pollinators.

That's where our guest of honor comes in.

Lithophragma parviflorum var. parviflorum

Lithophragma = stone fence and parvifolum = small leaves

AKA: Small-Flowered Prairie Star; Prairie Starflower; Small-Flowered Fringecup; Woodland Star; Pink Woodland Star, Smallflower Woodland Star...and every possible spelling combination you can imagine.

Family: Saxifrage (Rocksplitter or rockfoil). Check out pnwflowers.com for some WA State relatives. There are two schools of thought for the name saxifrage; the rocksplitter could be because it is often observed growing in thin, rocky soil through the cracks of stones...or because it has been used as a kidneystone treatment back in the days of yore. This is where I remind you that you shouldn't ever experiment with unfamiliar plants, but if you're determined, the Darwin Awards will always be looking for fresh candidates. You can submit your nomination HERE.

And here are the little darlings. They are small, small spots of brightness in the unrelenting green sweeps. The flowers are their widest spread are 1.6cm--that's less than 3/4ths of an inch in the old money.

The showing is not grand; these flowers survived a lot of heavy human impact for a long time, and probably aggressive eradication from the owners of the Flett Dairy--parts of this plant will poison livestock.

Last year we only had one small clump at the base of an oak. This year we have 4. It is too early to tell if this flower is rebounding or if it simply enjoyed the nonstop comedy that was the winter weather for 2021-2022.

Native to British Columbia all the way down to Northern California, its smallness and easily-overlooked bloom can classify it as an ordinary weed.

But, as is so often the case, it isn't. Just ask the researchers up at Washington State University (WSU) about the L. parviflorum. They landed on one whale of a neat study with this little flower and a moth that everyone thought had just been unilaterally parasitizing on it: the Greya politella (In English that roughly means, 'polished gray' regarding the forewings)

Just look at that little munchin:

The moths were found laying their eggs inside the flowers by injecting them directly into the plant's ovary. This guarantees the pollination happens, and since they visit multiple flowers, more pollination happens. After the eggs hatch the larvae's first meal is the seeds inside the flower.

It doesn't sound all that beneficial to our woodland star, but the researchers learned some of the sites that were visited by the moths had a much better rate of carrying viable seeds to maturity. Others showed no difference at all, and a third category suggested the flower was selectively aborting seed capsules pollinated by the Greya. What the heck? The colleges samples all over the place, from WA to CA to ID, in as many different environments that the flower is natural to. This meant stomping around Ponderosa woodlands, open grasslands like the upper half of our Flett Outdoor Lab, and steep streambanks.

In short, the relationship between moth and flower is an evolutionary flux zone, and I wonder how many of the researchers kicked up their heels and went hurray at learning something new. This variety of species interaction is rare; we know there's probably a lot of it going on, but we usually discover cases for sample studies like this: getting out and focusing on a small facet of a pretty large and dynamic system.

Want to read the full article? Go here:

A wildflower, a moth, and a diverse landscape: Shifting relationships offer a rare view of how species interactions evolve

Think botanical illustrations are cool? Awesome! Here's an illo of the L. parvifolum if you have the urge to break out the colored pencils. http://www.efloras.org/object_page.aspx?object_id=114964&flora_id=1