This is most likely to be my last week here at the BLM in Medford, OR. My partner and I have finished the annual report and our final task is now sorting through our vouchers, performing quality control, and shipping vouchers out to OSU and the Smithsonian.

It’s been an interesting journey. While printing out maps and reviewing vouchers, waves of memories of the amazing landscapes and small adventures that were flew into my mind. I was reminded of how rewarding this experience really was. I learned an immense amount of knowledge and wisdom and had the opportunity to meet many people from across the pacific northwest that are involved in native plant seed increase, native habitat restoration, various research projects, and more.

I’m not sure what will be next. I’ll be spending my time finishing up my graduate program at Southern Oregon University and graduating in March with my M.S. in Environmental Education. I go back and forth about returning for another season next year. I feel ready to move on to something else, but at the same time I’m terrified of job hunting.

My interest these days is in encouraging the public to enhance their landscapes with native wildlife habitats and I hope to find some sort of work that allows me to do that in some capacity. I feel that my experience here has given me the experience necessary to move in that direction, given the numerous ecoregions, habitats, and microhabitats that we have explored along with the botanical surveys we conducted at all of these locations. I am especially interested in figuring out how to get native plant materials to the general public in a more accessible and affordable way. I have also had the opportunity to do mycological education with kids and adults recently and I would very much like to lead educational mushroom hikes next year during Spring and Summer.

At any rate, so life continues.

I wish everyone the best in whatever it is they end up pursuing. But above all else,

Take it easy.

                – Jason Wilson

The temperatures have cooled down a bit here in Southern Oregon. We’ve been enjoying weather in the low to mid 90s for much of the past couple of weeks which has been a much appreciated contrast to the 105 degree weather a month ago.

As far as plants go, the high elevation plants have been seeding for the past several weeks and will probably continue into the next several weeks. We have also been making the last collections of the season from the valley floors. These plants are often quite thorny or hairy which inevitably leads to a painful collection process. We have also been finding a lot of berries such as Oregon Grape, gooseberries and other currants, Bitter Cherry, and others. We have quickly learned that collecting berries can be quite a sticky affair.

I currently have approximately four more days of the internship left before I take off for seven weeks to teach 2^nd – 8^th graders in the field about ecology and the natural history of this region. My work for this internship has definitely beefed up my botanical knowledge, which will be helpful in identifying plants for kids.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about my time here at the BLM. I have discovered a lot of natural areas that I will be visiting for years to come. I am very happy to be able to recognize native plants in my region. I appreciate the knowledge that I will have walking away from this internship. As an avid gardening enthusiast and a hopeful garden educator, I hope that I will be able to use native plants more in my gardens and suggest various native plants and their uses to others.

On the other hand, by working for the agency and performing this work, I have realized that both working for the agency and doing this kind of work is not for me, although I have a lot of respect for those that love this work and this agency. Alas, by the end of this internship I feel like I’m in the same empty place, lacking direction, as I was before I started, and that feels disconcerting and very challenging. But I thank the CLM and Chicago Botanic Gardens for the chance to have this experience. It has been an interesting ride.

– Jason

Things have been nothing short of interesting here in the Rogue Valley. The heat has been on as temperatures have been reaching averages of 104 degrees regularly. We got a bit of relief last week as some cloud cover, rain, and storms moved in, but this has only lead to the birth of numerous lightning fires throughout the state. Luckily most of the fires have been to the East of the Cascades so far and we have not experienced much air pollution from the smoke of nearby fires.

As a result of the weather, and the fact that pretty much everything on the valley floor has gone to seed and dried out, we have moved our scouting for plants into the higher elevations of the nearby mountains. Between 2,000 and 5,000 feet elevation, plants are now either still flowering or going to seed. Scouting the mountains has reignited an appreciation for the geology of this region. At the south end of the Rogue Valley the Klamath-Siskiyous and the Cascades encompass the valley like a large bowl. This leads to a wide variety of habitat niches. Some of the mountains nearby are plutons, large rocky bubbles, essentially. Some mountains are volcanic, others the result of the North American tectonic plate shifting over the Juan de Fuca plate. Most of the mountains nearby are basaltic while others toward the Illinois River valley are mostly serpentinite and yield diverse plant communities all their own including many local endemics.

We have now reached approximately 50 collections, so we are merely 10 collections away from our initial target of 60 collections, which we are sure to exceed. So far we have vouchered approximately 130 botanical specimens. As the season starts to enter its final leg, it seems like we have made good progress and I am satisfied with our results.

This all comes in good time as my Environmental Education graduate program at Southern Oregon University starts back up. I am now in a transition period between switching from the seed collecting world to the outdoor education world as I have to reduce my work time in exchange for taking classes and planning lessons in preparation for our Fall in the Field residential and day programs in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Ashland, OR and the Deer Creek Center in Selma, OR. I have a little over a month to go with the BLM/SOS and I can say that I am pleased with my experience in this program thus far and will look back fondly on this internship. It looks like we will have accomplished what we set out to accomplish and got to explore Oregon’s many wonderful outdoor areas in the process. I suppose I can’t ask for much more than that.

– Jason

It has been quite a time of excitement for us lately here in Oregon. The past several weeks have been chock full of seed collection opportunities and other adventures. To start off, last Thursday my partner, Mason, and I found ourselves being evacuated from the top of Upper Table Rock due to a fire that started at the base of the mountain and was creeping toward us. We quickly gathered as much Fool’s Onion (Tritileia hyacinthina) seed as we could before hiking down the two mile trail with a sheriff’s department officer and three other hikers that unfortunately had just reached the top before finding out they had to turn around and immediately hike back down. By the time we reached the bottom, the fire had nearly spread to the top of Upper Table Rock, not far from where I had been standing looking down on the fire just 45 minutes prior.

This week my mentor, Doug Kendig, my partner, Mason London, and I embarked on a week-long tour of nurseries, seed farms, and seed processing facilities. We departed Medford, Oregon on Monday and headed toward Bend ready to deliver nine collections to the Bend Seed Extractory. Sarah and Kayla gave us an in depth tour of their operation, including demonstrations of some of the seed cleaning equipment, seed viability tests, and more. It was a great experience to actually see where our seed goes, what happens to it when it leaves our hands, and who spends their time and energy managing our seed. We left with a great appreciation for everything Sarah and Kayla do at the Bend Seed Extractory.

From there we headed north toward the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. After a short stop to examine the impressive exposed rock revealing millions of years of natural history, we continued our journey north. We later stopped at a quaint little town called Fossil, Oregon. While there, of course, we searched for fossils. There is a public fossil digging area behind Fossil High School. If anyone is ever passing through the area, I recommend the stop. Fossils that are anywhere between a million to thirty million years old can be found in the area.

We stopped for the night along the Columbia River before pressing on the next morning toward Moses Lake, WA, our northern most destination. Our first stop of the day Tuesday was at BFI Native Seed near Warden, Washington. BFI is a native seed increase farm that grows out source-verified grass and forb seed. It was an incredibly impressive and professional operation. Plants from all sorts of different biotypes were represented on this ~1700 acre farm. It was an opportunity to see how individuals of the same species that have become adapted to very different environments share different phenotypes. Seeing these very different expressions of the same species highlighted some of the difficulties of identifying forbs and grasses that we had encountered in the field.

After leaving BFI Native Seed we made a stop at Rainier Seed LLC, another seed growing operation that grows various sourced seed including natives. This farm consists of ~5000 acres in total, including all contracted farming operations tied to the company. We were lead through a variety of fields of different flowering and seeding plants that would soon be harvested and cleaned.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25) we will be attending a restoration tour led by the owner of BFI Native Seed to see how these native plant seeds are used in restoration projects and what the final result can look like. We are quite excited to complete this ever expanding perspective of the native seed network by seeing examples of the seed actually in use for conservation or restoration purposes.

There is still a lot of touring and driving left before we make it back home to Medford on Friday. After leaving the Moses Lake area in Washington, we will be making our way to the Willamette Valley area in Oregon to stop by the Plant Materials Center in Corvallis, as well as possibly other seed farms or native plant nurseries along the way.

All in all it has been a very informative, interesting, and exciting couple of weeks for the Rogue Valley crew! If any of you have a chance to stop by the Bend Seed Extractory, I highly suggest it, as it really helped me to understand the greater system that we are apart of and how I can help make their jobs easier by making simple adjustments to my seed collecting techniques.

I hope everyone out there is doing well.

The stages from collection to cleaned seed

Seed cleaning demo

Searching for fossils in Fossil

Plant plugs and greenhouse at BFI Native Seed

Fields of Oregon Sunshine at BFI Native Seed

Finished clean seed

Seed processing equipment at Bend Seed Extractory

After a month of waiting, the Rogue Valley’s native plants have finally begun their first round of seeding!

So far we have been able to make numerous collections of interesting plants like the silvery lupine, Lupinus albifrons, the onion grass, Melica geyeri, or the slender meadowfoam, Limnanthes gracilis. The process of surveying these plants and then following them every week until they go to seed has been a unique and gratifying experience for myself, personally. The longer I work on seed collecting, the more sophisticated my eyes are becoming when gazing into southern Oregon’s natural environments. It is a constant reminder that there can be a seemingly infinity of objects to perceive in nature at any particular spot, if we could just learn to see what is there.

My partner, Mason, and I are excited to get back into the field and not only collect seed of our scouted populations but also hunt for freshly flowering populations to keep on our radar for the upcoming summer months.

– Jason

It has been an exciting time for wildflower surveying in and around the Rogue Valley. My partner and I are reaching a lull period where we wait for the plants in the locations we have scouted to go to seed. Through scouting locations and surveying for botanicals we have discovered a number of incredibly scenic hikes, of which one of our favorites is the Enchanted Forest Trail in the Applegate Valley. If you happen to visit or live in the area and have not been on this trail, check it out!

This week we have had the fantastic opportunity to help a crew of professional and amateur botanists survey French Flat in Cave Junction, OR for the rare and endangered plant Lomatium cookii. This has proven to be a very rewarding experience. We have had the opportunity to work with this rare plant while also scouting the surrounding area for suitable populations for voucher pressings and seed collection. Very knowledgeable researchers for the project took us on naturalist hikes to become even better acquainted with the flora of the region.

Also while waiting for our populations to seed, next week we will be photographing plant vouchers here at the Medford BLM office to help digitize their herbarium and link all of the images to their plant database!

All in all we have been learning TONS of previously unfamiliar flora while enjoying the last bit of Spring here in southern Oregon. If you haven’t been out here in the spring time, I highly recommend it. There is always more to see!

Take it easy,

– Jason Wilson