Diversity on the Margins
Some thoughts after discovering two rare trees
My peninsula, the Key Peninsula, is an odd forgotten corner of Salish Sea country, a nook, a cranny, a hideout. It’s not on peoples’ maps like, say, the San Juan Islands. Which is how many of us like it.
I don’t mean to go all fractal here, but the peninsula itself, though not super convoluted in terms of topography, is loaded with nooks and pockets and corners of its own, hillsides and homesteads, moss-swallowed dales, clearings, dreams.
Sneaky secret spaces are one of the hallmarks and infinite qualities of the KP.
Within the same era, a century ago, you had camps of bachelor loggers wrestling big timber, wealthy Seattleites yachting in friends and employees to estates with names like Far-A-Way, homesteader families eking out livings by raising fruit and eggs and cutting brush for the floral trade, indigenous families swinging by to fish and harvest clams, and members of Home Colony putting their anarchist ideals into practice through cooperative living and the nationwide mailing of provoking newspapers.
And while American culture has become, to this spy’s jaded eye, a homogenizing steamroller—even along the backroads the basic tenets of frugality, self-sufficiency, community, local color, etc etc are forever being eroded by the need to make ends meet in a corporatized economy and the technologies that bait-and-switch our skills and individualism, and of course the purchased simulacra of ruralness—even I have to admit, for all my kvetching, that on this peninsula, moving from one property to the next, as I go about talking with folks about their lives and their places, diversity persists.
At some level. We’ve lost our out-and-out anarchists and many of the dreams of alternative economies, and still, mixed up in a thousand ways are the nooks and crannies of the KP landscape and the people who inhabit them.
Which gives me heart. The steamroller has yet to be invented that can fully squeeze into every private corner of life. Around here, for those who know how to seek them, there are still spaces to breathe; still folks who remember that we live in a garden of forking paths.
Now let’s talk trees.
Tree 1: Sitka Spruce
Two months ago I found myself deep in the woods, alone, cautiously approaching a monster fir on the far side of Minter Creek. It had its own clearing. I’d bushwhacked a long way to get to this point and the creek crossing was sketchy.
So I was already feeling cautious when I noticed a frayed rope hanging from one of the fir’s huge errant limbs. Then I saw a shelter of some sort blending in with the ferns—no, a camp chair grown over with moss. There was occult energy in those deep woods. The scraps of trails I found could have been animal trails or recently defunct human trails. Cedars dipped their knobby knees in the creek.
As I climbed a low ridge to leave, through the forest canopy I saw a large tree silhouetted. Its limbs, to my eye, had a distinctive and slightly pagoda-like structure, with the branchlets hanging down from horizontal branches rather than spraying out as in Douglas firs. If it was indeed a hemlock, I thought, I should give it a look.
I was shocked. It was no hemlock. It was a Sitka spruce.
It measured out at 145’ tall and over 3’ in diameter. 274 points as a champion tree.
In my quest to find the champion trees of the Key Peninsula—the biggest specimens of each native species—no bigger question has circled than that of Sitka spruce. By far the largest species of spruce in the world, Sitka spruce is a dominant member of forests just a few dozen miles west. But other than a few scattered rumors, I could not tell if any existed in the wild here.
Sitka spruce thrives where the Pacific Ocean’s influence is strong. Our climate in the south Salish Sea is a good bit hotter and drier than that of the coast, especially in summer. One would think that summer weather is Sitka spruce’s kryptonite. In a way it is. Physiologically the tree can handle our heat just fine. It is a native weevil that is its downfall. The weevil lives much of its life in the leader of a young Sitka spruce. If enough weevils are in a tree, tunneling and eating, the leader is girdled and killed. Now stunted, the tree grows out instead of up, creating a wacky bush instead of a tall tree. It may develop a new leader. Then it may be attacked again. If a tree manages to get past fifty feet in height it is usually impervious to the weevils.
Along the coast, mist and general dampness work to keep the weevils in check. In sunnier areas like ours, they thrive. Sitka spruce are generally absent.
And yet—now I’ve confirmed several on the Key Peninsula. They are large. They are widely scattered. All are in low spots near water, where I can imagine the microclimates are a little damper.
Like some of the characters that live on the KP—right now I’m thinking of a white-bearded man who drives a Ghostbusters van around town—these isolated trees raise more questions than they answer. How do they reproduce and spread seed in such low numbers? Are any young ones making a go of it, or are all of our Sitka spruces relicts? Will they decline?
They’re an alternative tree, and they’re here. I ask, How? That’s a question, and what’s a question but a door to different possibilities?
Tree 2: Garry Oak
See me burying the lede deep here, covered with bits of other forest stuff, like you would plant an acorn? I apologize. I feel I’ve got to downplay this second discovery till I have a better sense of the strength of its taproot.
Last month with an experienced forest tromping companion, on a south-facing bluff with difficult access, we stumbled upon a grove of Garry oaks.
The Key Peninsula is a good distance from the nearest known population—as far as I know. It was a complicated adventure to get there. We followed deer trails that crossed landslide chutes and dove through perched thickets. Too high and we were stymied by blackberries. Too low and it was poison oak.
We were standing on a steep slope with hazelnut and madrona and big firs, and my companion was helping me recognize the poison oak stalks that wound through the underbrush below.
“Uh huh,” I said as I followed one with my eyes, noting its blunt upturned branch tips, lifting my gaze as it climbed a tree trunk. “Yeah, okay, I see, even some oak leaves still on it— Wait! Oak leaves! Actual oak leaves!”
The poison oak was leafless, but the Garry oak it was climbing was unmistakable once we recognized it.
We found five oaks. Based on where they’re growing on an unstable bluff, surrounded by native plants including old firs, they seem a natural grove. I plan to go back to scout more thoroughly. I’ll inventory the trees, see if they are producing acorns, and get a sense—since oaks have the capacity to support a higher diversity of insect life than any other North American tree—of which invertebrate communities have made the cross-sound leap with these oaks to this isolated location. I did note apple galls on the lower branches.
Garry oak, a.k.a. Oregon white oak, Washington’s only species of oak, likes it dry and open. The characteristic oak savannas, for me, are those around Lakewood, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and Yelm. Such ecosystems were created and maintained by indigenous management. Given a chance, conifers will shade out oaks. Oaks can be seen along the I-5 corridor going south to Portland and are common in the Willamette Valley. They are in the Columbia Gorge and along the east slopes of the Cascades.
It’s up around the Salish Sea that their range fractures into a few far-flung pockets, including on Vancouver Island, the San Juans, the Oak Harbor area on Whidbey Island, and some relict groves along Hood Canal.
It feels premature to try to put this Key Peninsula grove into the regional context. But knowing they are there? Man. It feels significant.
There you have it. Hiding in their pockets, biding their time, probably testing the limits of their own tolerance, are these two species, Sitka spruce and Garry oak—one in creek bottoms where chill and mist cling longer than in the surrounding landscape; one on an exposed bluff where unstable ground slides to create sun-baked openings.
If the general climate were to shift, marginal species like these would help our forests shift with it. That, to me, is one of the great beauties of diversity. It holds not only possibility but adaptability. I’m talking ecological diversity, and I’m talking cultural diversity too. Finding those oaks was like finding a group of folks speaking an endangered language.
The things that live in the hidden corners may hang on by threads for many years, but as long as they live they hold open the pathways that otherwise would be choked with weeds and lost. For those of us who frequently find ourselves at odds with the snorting old steamroller, it seems a duty to preserve not just our own hidden corners but the landscapes that have enough of that fractal quality to harbor lives unexpected.
That way, when things founder, we’ll have a chance of finding other ways.
Thank you for reading Infinite Peninsula. Up next is an in-depth two-part exploration of the swirling waters of Burley Lagoon. Subscribe to receive every ramble and adventure. Become a paid subscriber to keep me going. And share with anyone who would dig a spy’s-eye view of this sneaky diverse corner of Cascadia.
This was such a great read! Thank you!
Intriguing discoveries. We have been recently discussing planting Quercus garryana in new and restored landscapes more regularly. What a powerful keystone species and fascinating to see it in isolated pockets in our area. Clark Nursery up North in WA grows them currently in our area and specializes in native plants for the last 50 years.