Change and hitchhikers

These days we seem to be spending almost as much time cleaning up afterwards as we did romping in the woods. Wet spring weather inexorably moved on to clear skies and warmer days, giving us respite from the post-walk rubdown with the tattered bath towels set aside for the dogs. But as dry weather persists and the season progresses, I find myself doing a lot of nit-picking when we finish our walks. Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by Pojar and Mackinnon, Lone Pine Publishing, 1994, tells me that the culprit is Osmorhiza chilensis, commonly known as mountain sweet-cicely. We find it along the wider sections of our wooded paths, an unassuming perennial member of the carrot family, about a foot tall, and notable for its spread of coarsely toothed, slightly hairy leaves. It seemed to me that the plant has something of a quiet dignity about it, but in my earlier spring walks I was more interested in the forest superstars: trillium, starflower, and the emerging sword and bracken ferns.

O. chilensis gets harder to ignore as the season progresses. Intent on watching the trillium blossoms morph into seedpod (with the view of picking a few to cultivate in the shadier parts of my yard) I failed to notice the carrot cousin taking on a rangier aspect. The little non-descript white flowers weren't all that appealing, and besides, I was having to keep one eye peeled for the stinging nettles also lurk along our route.

The solstice came and went. The damp carpet of compost and loam dried out and the newly hatched winter wrens grew up and moved on. And all this time mountain sweet-cicely was developing its fruit, about which Pojar and Mackinnon have this to say: "black, needle-like, 12-22 mm long, narrowing below tip, broadening into a beak, bristly-hairy, often catching on clothing or fur." My emphasis. What the guidebook fails to mention is that the mature seeds spring from the weed at the slightest disturbance, show an unfortunate affinity for athletic socks and the knit fabric that lines our sneakers and that, once imbedded, are the devil to remove. And "needle-like" hardly does them justice.

So what began in the spring as an attractive and unassuming border at the edge of the path has become a fanged gauntlet the dogs and I have to run if we're to impose ourselves on the forest across the road. As I go at my socks and sneaker insides with tweezers this morning I take pale solace in the knowledge that the dogs and I are helping to broadcast the message of Osmorhiza chilensis across the face of the green earth. May I get as many trilliums in my yard next spring as their carrot cousins from hell.