My name is Lorna. I have been working as an intern under the Seeds of Success program via the BLM Spokane District Office. This is the end of my third week. I will be turning 57 next week. I live in Spokane and have an awesome husband, who I met 30 years ago, a straw bale home, and a big garden. So, that is why I stayed in Spokane instead of going somewhere new, where I might have discovered many more new plants!

Last week I was out digging up some voucher specimens (Lupinus sulfureus, or sulfur lupine) when I noticed a tiny creature, maybe two centimeters long, which looked suspiciously like a scorpion! I live in Washington State for goodness sake! Well, using Google, I found out we DO have a little scorpion called the Northern Scorpion, and I also found out that it isn’t any danger to botanists. http://www.bentler.us/eastern-washington/animals/arachnids/northern-scorpion.aspx

I dug up an entire Balsamorhiza sagittata plant one day, using my mentor’s prize digging stick, which is made of the same material as a pry bar, very heavy, but has a T-shaped handle and a curved tip. The balsamroot was in dark soil with lots of basalt rubble mixed in. It was at the base of a basalt cliff. So the digging stick was essential. I was amazed at how fat the root was, about 3″ in diameter, and that it actually had a coarse bark, like a tree’s. When I accidentally chipped the dark brown bark off, a white-ish interior was revealed. Silly me, though–I thought I could slice the root to use in a voucher sample, but it was like trying to slice a piece of wood! Very fibrous.

My mentor, Kim, has taken me to some places to look for likely seed populations. We have eight or nine populations scoped out. I actually have collected seed for Lomatium macrocarpum. I THINK we have about 15,400 seeds. Hopefully I’ll be able to send them to Bend, Oregon, for cleaning on Monday. I’m really curious how many I really collected. First seed collection ever!

Lastly, I was out doing monitoring at recently vacated sage grouse nests, with three other people. One of the guys said that while he was out tracking sage grouse, he noticed a pure white bitterroot with the normally green parts of the plant being yellow-green. That was interesting. Lo and behold, we saw one on the way back to the truck!

I would have posted some photos, but while upgrading to a new version of Apple, I lost everything in my phone and now I have to go down to the phone store!