On late spring nights, the one-night-only performance of the soap plant transfixes a State Parks naturalist.
by Morgan Dill
May 28, 2014—The coast is a busy place as spring heads into summer, and it is in the calm of the early evening that my favorite moments often happen. For me, this is often at Rancho del Oso. It is the slow walks with the evening chorus of the birds on the Marsh Trail to keep me company, watching the resident scrub jay vie for my attention against the sunset on the deck of the Nature and History Center, seeing colorful dragonflies dart around in search of food, and rabbits ducking into the brush that are characteristic of the “after hours.”
But it is the one-night-only (!!!) flowers of the wavy-leafed soap plant (Chlorogalum pomeridianum) that send me into a tizzy at this time of year. The anticipation of their display is part of the wonder of this perennial, sometimes known as soaproot or amole. There is incredible cultural history to this plant from the lily family (starting with its use by native peoples to chemically stun fish, making them easy to gather), but that is for another day—we’ve got dramatic displays to describe!
Read about the springtime flowering of the yellow rock-rose in Blogging Naturalist: Daniel Williford
Read about Sticky Monkey-flower
The first thing I watch for each year are telltale clusters of long, thin, wavy, blue-green leaves that can be found on brushy hillsides. At Rancho del Oso they also spring up along the Marsh Trail, the entrance road and the 0.8-mile Nature Trail. If I’m too distracted by other things that are flowering, moving and buzzing about—which is likely at this time of year—the late spring arrival of the flower stalk usually snaps me back to attention, since with a height of 5 to 8 feet it’s hard to miss! The flower stalk is tightly packed with dozens of green buds that promise flowers, and over a week or more, each day reveals its slow expansion of tall, branched stems.
At this point in the season, I am making daily trips after 5pm to my known soap plant locations, watching for the green buds to slowly get bigger, to the point where they look almost like bean pods ready to burst. Starting with the buds closest to the base of the plant, with each day they slowly change to the color white, with purplish stripes running up each petal and sepal that is almost bursting open. This is when you know to clear your evening and wait, because something dare I say magical is about to happen.
The first time I saw soap plant bloom was last year, and I audibly gasped and exclaimed as I watched the white bud suddenly burst open right in front of me. It was both instant and slow motion at once, and I was scared to look away and miss even a second as the small white flower unfolded. It would have happened without me, and knowing this, I felt elated to be there.
This year I knew the soap plant bloom was coming, and I was ready. The first evening I went out to check followed a cloudy afternoon, and the evening’s set of flowers had already opened. The flowers stay open all night, pinning all their reproductive hopes on pollinators that reach them before they wilt and close by the next morning, drying and fading away. These already-opened flowers were beautiful, no doubt, but I wanted to see magic unfold before my eyes!
The next night I waited, sitting on the ground, watching. I saw a beetle crawl across a nearby leaf, listened to the waves in the distance, noticed the different colors of the hedge nettle flowering nearby. I even convinced a 7-year-old to keep watch with me. We guessed which flowers were going to bloom that night, and when we touched one ever so slightly it burst open, much to our surprise. Others were slower, a petal at a time, unfurling to reveal the interior. We marveled at the anther as it turned from crimson red to yellow the longer the flower was open, and at how many more flowers the plant promised in the upcoming nights. We must have waited with the soap plant for almost an hour as it filled with dozens of flowers. And I’ll definitely be waiting again, because it is still blooming out there (probably right now as I write this), and I’m not going to miss that. I wouldn’t want you to miss it, either!
Morgan Dill is a Midwestern transplant to the California coast with a penchant for plants, tide pools, exploring new places and finding excitement in everything. Working in environmental education since her first volunteer job at a local nature center in high school, and from the shores of the Penobscot Bay in Maine to the Santa Cruz Mountains with outdoor science school and State Parks, teaching in the outdoors is her passion. Currently, Morgan is the Park Interpretive Specialist at Rancho del Oso, in the coastal section of Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
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