This day, Friday I planned to have a number of individuals join me to visit two sites in around Salem. Lake Labish in the morning and Minto-Brown Park in the afternoon. It went just as these things always go, at least one cancellation, one conflict, several people early and some people late. But we hit the field at Lake Labish by 10:30 after having a lively discussion for 30 minutes about lots of things. A van from OSU arrived at 10:20 and had some Native students, and we had Molly Carney (OSU Anthropology) and David Craig (WU Biology) to help with plant identification. As always Sam Lea was a great host and was very patient with us all.
Just as I had hoped, we found wapato in flower, the peak of flowering was probably 2 weeks earlier. I know everything is early this year, by one month to 2 weeks at least, so my mental calculations of the best time to come was off. I will try to hit the height of the flowering season next year.
First we saw an amazing field of tule (maybe bulrush) when it was flowering. Sam is now allowing it to remain and we have enough already to begin harvesting for weaving purposes. Mats from tule were used to make room dividers and even large flexible wraps for housing.
Then Cattail too was doing quite well, another plant which is good for weaving. Cattail mats were great for sleeping on.
Found a wapato flower at last, only about 10 percent of the plants were still in flower and they are spectacular.
A very health population of wapato here now. the plants are in the middle of creating their seeds, and after that they will decline, and put their energy into making their tubers. We dug around several plants and the tubers were hard to find, most were very small, suggesting we can only dig tubers in September, the traditional time to dig wapato.
We walked the site for about an hour and then traveled to Minto-Brown Island Park to check the two areas there with wapato.
Stopping first at the first parking area and walking down the path alongside the Willamette Slough we caught our first glimpse of wapato. We had a planting out here last year, with the city, but I think there was already a population here before. Some of the plants exhibit a large size and there are indications that some plants are of a different species. Notice the plants above are very large in size suggesting some age. I think this is also too far from where we planted last year.
We found a few plants in flower here too.
I left the above photo large, the leaves here are about the size of our heads, and they are very impressive. David Craig suggested that maybe the large leaves indicate they are in the shade so need the extra area to capture sunlight.
This patch we absolutely did plant last year. I think every bulb came up, a very successful project.
The ecology here seems perfect for marshy wapato, I expect it to spread across the area if it stays shallow.
A photo of the slough with what appear to be two different species of wapato, the broadleaf (blue line) (Sagittaria latifolia) and a variety of narrow leaf (red line), (perhaps Sagittaria cuneata). This may indicate that the narrow leaf was already here before we planted the broad leaf. This kind of co-occurrence is common in Oregon were we have six varieties, most of whom are on the Columbia.
Finally at Oxbow Slough we found wapato, what appear to be thin leaf, and then looking across the river there were additional shiny leaves on the shoreline suggesting the shores are lined with wapato here. The wapato leaves are facing away from us a process called Heliotropism, when a plant follows the sun. We plan to get out in a canoe and find out.
Another small colony on the left side of the boat launch at Oxbow slough.
More treks to come this summer!