In mid-June, I finally stopped spending all my spare time puttering in the vegetable garden and made some dates to hike with friends and look for plants.
It’s now two weeks into July. We’re past the “peak flower” time for wildflowers in the Chugach Mountains. I’ve been too busy to post about each adventure but have saved up some memories and pictures to share in a few photo galleries.
My hiking group will have bittersweet recollections of one hike late June. Several of us joined a 7 a.m. trip that started on the lower slopes of Pioneer Peak – the familiar massif that looms over Palmer, Alaska. Six days later, we found out that one of our hiking companions and two others, including her husband, had died in a small plane accident.
Also, in recent weeks, Alaskans have been suffering from record-level heat, smoke from wildfires, and the dumpster fire of Alaska’s political situation. Higher elevations have been providing many of us with a little respite from all of the above.
Click on the pictures for a closer look.
Pioneer Peak trail, June 23 with the Alaska Native Plant Society:
Cornus canadensis, dwarf dogwood or bunchberry 
Native elderberry fruit have toxic seeds but some people strain them out to make jelly and other edibles. 
Elderberry flowers are edible but these are too far along. 
The “seed cups” of Chrysosplenium tetrandrum, Northern Water Carpet, look like flowers from a distance. 
Emerging bud of Angelica lucida, seacoast angelica. 
New shoots of Angelica lucida can be eaten but the flowering stalks (second year growth) are not edible. 
Heuchera glabra (alpine heuchera) is easy to identify if you grow commercial cultivars in your own garden, like I do! 
Streptopus amplexifolius, known as twisted stalk or watermelon berry, has sweet little flowers.
Hatcher Pass, Gold Cord Lake trail, June 30
Veronica Wormskjoldii, Alpine Veronica, or a related variety. 
A variety in the coltsfoot (Petasites) genus, probably Frigid Coltsfoot, at its most beautiful. 
Amazing views, not many flowers, on the back side of Gold Cord Lake.
Hatcher Pass, Craigie Creek trail, July 6, with the Alaska Native Plant Society
Alaska has orchids. This is Plantanthera dilitata, Bog Candle. 
Larkspur, delphinium glaucum, admire but do not eat! 
Cow Parsnip and larkspur on a hot summer morning.
Denali State Park, Ermine Hill Trail, July 7
Fireweed and Monkshood tangled up in a meadow. 
The green blossoms of false hellebore, Veratrum Veride, a highly poisonous plant. 
Umbels of cow parsnip, Heracleum Lanatum, in a meadow.
Transcendental Gardening 