During dad's last visit, we drove up north to Ukiah, Mendocino, and various wineries in the area, and as usual, I was snapping away. The
photo page from this trip is now online, with around 40 pictures, and captions and all of that. Here's a representative sample of photos from the various areas we visited, minus their full captions, with the most detail placed on the redwood burl I was going to blog about separately.
Most of the trees in this valley looked dull and silvery, and I wondered why until I got home and looked at the zoomed photos I'd taken.
The main road, Highway 128, travels through this redwood forest for about 15 miles. It's amazing how close you are to these gigantic trees, and it's equally-amazing how bored all the locals were by it, as evidenced by them tailgating us at 50MPH in this very windy 40 zone. Dad drives pretty fast, but he had to pull over several times just to let delivery trucks slam past him. I'd have been perfectly happy tooling along at 25 and leaning out my open window like a labrador, or pulling over at any turn out and just walking off into the woods for an hour or two.
This beach, just south of Mendocino, was paved in small stones and covered by clumps of driftwood branches. The sticks were weird too, all waterlogged and flexible, and they didn't float. I tossed a few into the stream that ran down from the hills and cut a path through the sand, and they sunk like rocks.
Rock outcroppings emerged from the sea at low tide, weighted down by their soggy, slippery crop of seaweed.
Mendocino is set on an arrowhead-shaped point of land, with 20 meter cliffs on all sea sides. There is open space at the edge off town all the way around, and great walking trails... you've just got to know when to stop.
Redwood in a Pot!
The coolest thing we saw all day in a wine tasting room were these. They were obviously some sort of plant life, but we couldn't figure what. Turns out they're redwood burls. These are knobby, tumor sort of growths around the base of a redwood, and when cut off they will sprout and grow on their own. I'd never heard of them, having only seen redwoods sold as seeds or tiny saplings (which are 99% sure to die when you take them home), but they had three of them at one vineyard, and when I expressed interest and they said they were $20, I was sold.
I picked the biggest/greenest one, seen above on the right, and brought it home and stuck it in an earthenware dish on our shelf. It's going pretty good, and since I've been misting and pouring water over it for a couple of weeks now, the sprouts are beginning to erupting up through the top, as well as from the bottom. All the tall green ones you see here grow from the bottom, where it's wet. There are no roots of any kind, and I suppose I'll have to put it in dirt at some point. Redwood grow incredibly quickly, and are quite tenacious in their areas, but they have to have rich soil and cool temps and lots and lots of rain, which is why you don't see them growing in gardens all over the country/world.
Looking for info about these things online, I happened upon
The Redwood Doctor, who knows all.
A burl forms at the base of the tree and provides a reservoir of dormant buds that can sprout in the event of major structural damage to the trunk. The burl tissue provides a source of carbohydrates to its growing sprouts and can also generate roots.
He's not a fan of burls as pets, since he says they're usually illegally harvested from redwoods growing on protected land. (The ones pictured here were taken from healthy redwoods growing on the vineyard's land.) There is some
good info about them, but it's not real encouraging for my growing dreams.
Burls can be planted under the appropriate conditions to allow the shoots to form roots and then grow into trees, but the typical buyer of a redwood burl places it in water, watches the shoots grow, then disposes of it after the shoots die from lack of nutrients.
That's what I expected, since after all, plants grow in the ground, not in pots of water. There aren't enough nutrients in water to keep it going, and once the burl's reserves are depleted, it's going to die. So I'll have to put it in the ground, eventually, but we knew that already. In the meantime it's an interesting addition to our bamboo-centric display shelf, as seen below (without much visible bamboo).
It's growing fine so far, and the part I liked was that the shoots on the right bent and angled far to the side the very first day it was here, since that's towards where the sunshine comes in. They lean while the others grow straight, even though no direct sun ever hits this shelf. Okay, so plants aren't
that dumb.
Many more photos and words on these subjects can
be seen here.
