Hello! My name is Anna Freundlich and I am working in the BLM office in Lakeview, Oregon. Here in Lakeview I am going to make seed collections as part of the Seeds of Success (SOS) program and these past few weeks have already been pretty exciting. I graduated May 19th, went home for two days to pack, and then drove from my hometown of Lexington, Ohio for six days to arrive here in Oregon. While we were a bit rushed, my sister and I had a good time traveling across the U.S. From hiking in Wisconsin to visiting Mt. Rushmore to seeing bison on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake we had plenty of adventures. And besides getting lost in California for two hours on my last day of travel, the commute went pretty smoothly.

My first week and a half of work was rewarding and challenging. As one can imagine, the plants here in Oregon are quite different from the plants out east. Nearly every plant is foreign to me, but luckily the local botanist Ian Grinter and my fellow intern Lucy Landis are very patient and are helping me learn the plants out here. Because our Lakeview office is in a higher elevation and this area has been in a drought for the past three years, the seed situation is “interesting”. Our plants normally flower and set seed later in the season, but combined with the drought some populations are setting seeds later than anticipated or are not setting seed at all. My first day in the field Lucy and I went to check out a population of Trifolium macrocephalum clovers, only to discover that there were no seeds for us to collect. We also hit bad luck when we went to collect seed from a population of Lupine; we were dismayed to discover that the cows had beaten us to the lupine flowers. If only we had known that the flowers were so tasty!

But things are not hopeless. Today we went out to Sage Hen Butte in the southern part of the district with some botanists from Alturas. On a hilltop overlooking the mountains, we finally found a site that had potential for seed collections. Here we found many different populations of native plants including Indian paintbrush, multiple species of Eriogonum (Wild Buckwheat) and my favorite plant of the day Lewisia rediviva. This small plant had red stems, beautiful white flowers, and seemed to crawl out from under the rocks. After our CLM training trip in Chicago next week, we plan on making many collections at this beautiful site.

I am looking forward to a great summer and I am so glad I have this opportunity!
Lakeview, Oregon BLM

Favorite flower of the day!