The Canada Day long weekend can offer many outdoors choices — too many, sometimes — depending on water and weather conditions.
This year was almost too hot and muggy, featuring whining-dining mosquito millions borne of standing water followed by sudden heat after a long, unsprung spring.
Rivers and streams were even higher, darker chocolate and more unfishable than on the May long, so every passing rig wore some species of watercraft en route to fishing at Strubel and Mitchell Lakes and Ironsides Pond.
When we first bought the Stump Ranch acreage, family friend Dr. P. Duncan Hargrave, provincial horticulturist, came up from Brooks to inspect. Uncle Dunc was enthralled with our boreal forest — aspen parkland mix — and said he could spend a lifetime studying just one square metre of our forest floor.
Twenty-five years or so ago, my longtime para-legal assistant and gifted amateur herbalist, Ann Lang, joined us at the Stump Ranch on a sunny Canada Day, for ribs, stump-blowin’ beans, etc. While the ribs were doing their five hours in the water smoker, Herself and Anne found more than 50 species of wildflowers, so many that to identify some of them, we had to pore over the keys and photos in the excellent and authoritative Plants of the Western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland by Johnson, Kershaw, MacKinnon and Pojar.
Sadly, I have had to celebrate too many past Canada Day weekends by terminating a problem national symbol or two; that is no longer needed, now that oodles of otters along the creek invade the lodges and eat the beaver kits.
So, on this fishing-less, bug-infested, sweltering day I merely mounted my air conditioned rig and rode off in search of flora, maybe even fungi, although a poor morel season is past and it’s a tad early for oyster mushrooms, aspen boletes and shaggy manes.
At one favourite spot, I got out, but couldn’t detect the rich, exotic scent of wolf willow blooms. For consolation, there were latish star-flowered solomon’s seals at my feet, mingled with early yarrow. Woven into to the fence along the creek as far upstream as I could see were blooming prickly, or wild roses.
But my favourite Canada Day flower is the wild tiger, or wood lily and, sadly, there were again no orange-red blooms at the gate to Night Hole, where, several Canada Days ago, I caught a neighbour woman cutting a big bouquet of tiger lily blooms. They have bulldozed and turfed every native thing on their land, and now trespass on mine to harvest the wild stuff.
Cutting wood lilies kills them, I explained, because all the nutrients to feed the bulbs are in the leaves and stems. Every wildflower guide mentions the tiger-wood lily is becoming scarce because of over-picking. The woman and the flowers she thought she loved have never been back at the Night Hole gate … that I have seen.
We once dug up some growing bulbs and transplanted them in our Red Deer wildflower garden; they were never seen again. Unlike some native plants that go hawg-wild in town — wolf willow and the early blue violet, for example — wild tiger-wood lilies seldom survive civilization, even if you give then lots of sand, which they love.
Around 2000, the wood lily, fireweed and the brown-eyed susan were removed from the PlantWatch list, because their blooming is too late, thus too reliable, to be a good indicator of the effect of winter and spring weather on native plants.
Eventually this year’s Canada Day ride took me by the most reliable wood lily patch I know — and the unlikeliest — a grassy roadside sandbank thrown up years ago by the county ditch-scouring crew. There, loving that sand, were half a dozen orange wood lily blooms, just in time to celebrate Canada Day.
The whole wood lily-wild tiger lily plant was strong food and medicine for the Cree. A poultice of the flowers, for example, fixed spider bites, and a tea from the roots was magic for all manner of ailments, including new mothers’ difficulties in expelling the placenta. Flowers, seeds and bulbs were used as food; the bulbs said to be an acquired taste: strong, peppery and bitter. Sichuan hot and sour soup is not authentic without dried tiger lily buds as an antacid.
In my days of major macro photography, the wild tiger lily has given me many magic moments: finding and photographing an albino wood lily flower and finding a personal best plant with four blossoms from one stem.
Then there was the serendipity of the day I had my new Canon with macro lens all set up for its first-ever shot of a wood lily bloom, when a tiger swallowtail butterfly landed on the flower. Now, today as I write, I learn something new: that studies show the tiger swallowtail is a major pollinator of the wild tiger lily.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning columnist who lives in Red Deer. He can be reached at bscam@telusplanet.net.