Simply Salal

Thinking about salal, I can visualize the crisp, shiny green leaves sweeping through the understory, mounding up over the big stumps left from long-ago logging. I can hear the leaves slip and slap against my jacket as I bushwhack through thickets. I’ve seen its delicate rows of white bell-like flowers, and tasted the sweet, seedy dark purple berries. Salal is one of the most common native shrubs of the Pacific Northwest, and is, in my opinion, as emblematic of the coast as salmon or cedar trees. Salal (Gaultheria shallon) is a member of the Heather family, or Ericaceae, which includes many woody-stemmed shrubs, like rhododendrons, azaleas and laurel. Continue reading »

Filed under Nature Writing | Tags: Berries, Salal | Comment (1)

Fabulous Fall Fungi

When I opened my mushroom book recently, a sheath of loose-leaf paper fell out, with notes on various mushrooms that I had brought home for identification a few years ago. I still remember that day, when I laid the mushrooms out to take spore prints, and recorded their colour, texture, smell, growth form and habitat, trying to identify them (I did figure out some, but not others).

Fungi are a world unto themselves, being neither plants nor animals. Fungi do not have green chlorophyll like plants do, and cannot, like plants, manufacture their food from sunlight. Instead, fungi live off organic matter from living or dead plants and animals, and reproduce by simple, microscopic units called spores, rather than seeds. Continue reading »

Filed under Nature Writing | Tags: Amanita, Fungi, Mushrooms, Strawberries and Cream, Witch's Butter | Comment (0)