Make your New Year’s Resolution to get up close and personal with the beautiful bluff. Please consider joining the RCBR volunteers in 2025. Work off some holiday calories with other amazing folks. In 2024 our volunteers contributed 900-plus hours to the bluff restoration. Over seventy volunteers participated. On planting day, forty volunteers added eight hundred native plants to the bluff’s “natural” areas. Please join us in 2025 and fulfill your New Year’s Resolution.

Please check out more bluff close-ups on Instagram.

Rose City Bluff has about ten small oak trees east of what we call the Overlook, at NE 66th Street. In December, when other trees have dropped or will soon drop their leaves, these oaks hang on to their leaves. The name for this phenomenon is marcescence. Oak leaf marcescence is senescence without abscission. Why this happens we don’t really know. Is it stubbornness? Defiance? Maybe reluctance, as suggested by Robert Frost’s poem, Reluctance, published in 1913:

Out through the fields and the woods
   And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
   And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
   And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
   Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
   And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
   When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
   No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
   But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
   Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
   To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
   Of a love or a season?

We recently had the pleasure of walking the High Line in New York City, once one of the most unnatural spaces imaginable. It was an abandoned elevated rail line 30 feet above street level. It is now a 1.4-mile-long linear park with natural landscaping. It’s not limited to native plants, but the plant selection was inspired by plants which grew on the disused track. The High Line is only 30–50 ft wide and 18–24 inches deep, but it features about 400 species of plants. It attracts millions of visitors annually and has inspired cities throughout the US to create public spaces from obsolete infrastructure. The High Line’s creation was community driven. A nonprofit organization called Friends of the High Line was formed in 1999 by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who advocated its reuse as public open space. They completed the first phase in 2009.

Walking the High Line on a busy fall afternoon the dry and browning plants were captivating. One of the informative signs says High Line horticulturists prioritize plant form and structure: “Rather than selecting plants for their short-lived blooms in peak season, the full annual lifecycle of the plant is considered — including the beauty of their skeletal forms in winter.” We’re often struck by how great our bluff looks in winter, as well.

Rose City Bluff Restoration is lucky to have at least two areas with a healthy coverage of trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus). We don’t know if it was seeded by birds, nor do we know if it appeared before or after 2001 when former Rose City Golf superintendent, Jim Heck, spearheaded a significant restoration of the bluff. Though we haven’t planted any trailing blackberry ourselves, we encourage it by managing the Armenian blackberry that wants to take over. Thankfully, we have the space for this native blackberry.

A few weeks ago a large maple tree trunk fell. This wasn’t a surprise since it had been looking well past its prime for as long as we’ve been doing bluff restoration. We think it succumbed to heart rot: “Heart rot is a fungal disease that causes the decay of wood at the center of the trunk and branches. Fungi enter the tree through wounds in the bark and decay the heartwood. The diseased heartwood softens, making trees structurally weaker and prone to breakage. A good indication of heart rot is the presence of mushrooms or fungus conks on the tree. . . The fungi only target the nonliving wood tissue of the heartwood and do not affect the living sapwood. Initially, infected heartwood is discolored but not structurally compromised. As the fungi grow they decay more wood and the tissue becomes increasingly soft and weak. The tree can still grow around the decayed heartwood because the live wood tissue is not affected. The growth around decayed areas of heartwood creates structural weaknesses in the tree. Trees with extensive decay are more susceptible to broken branches and trunks.” (Wikipedia)

Heart rot in recently downed maple

Good indication of heart rot – fungi

Rose City Bluff Restoration volunteers added 700 native plants to the Bluff. Many thanks to the 40 planting day volunteers, to folks who grew and cared for plants all summer, and to all who donated funds to make this possible!

It’s Halloween! We thought it would be fun to learn about (and perhaps demystify) some of the scariest things on the bluff, because SPIDERS! So, here’s a little Halloween quiz for you. See if you can match the following scary substances with the plant or arthropod. NOTE: We haven’t actually seen black widow spiders on the bluff but they are in Oregon. Otherwise, watch out where you step and be careful what you eat!

Match each one of these substances: a. Phospholipase A (this enzyme can cause cells to rupture), b. Urushiol (found in sap of the Chinese lacquer tree and other plants), c. Juglone (think allelopathic), d. Atropine and Scopolamine (think belladonna), e. Latrotoxin (latro suggests a mercenary or bandit);

With one of these plants or Arthropod: 1. black widow spider, 2. wasp, 3. black walnut, 4. deadly nightshade, 5. poison oak.

By Kazvorpal, Wikipedia

Answers: a-2, b-5, c-3, d-4, e-1. Phospholipase A, wasp and bee venom. Phospholipase A (PLA) is an enzyme found in wasp venom that can cause cell lysis (rupture) and inflammation. Urushiol, poison oak. An oily, allergenic compound found in plants of the Anacardiaceae family, including poison ivy, poison oak, and Chinese lacquer trees. Juglone, black walnut. A compound found in walnuts, hickories, and other plants that can have a variety of effects on health and the environment, and can even kill plants. Thus the black walnut is allelopathic. Atropine and Scopolamine, deadly nightshade. Atropine and scopolamine are both toxins found in the berries and leaves of the deadly nightshade plant, Atropa belladonna, which can cause hallucinations and delirium if ingested. Latrotoxin, black widow spiders. A neurotoxin found in the venom of black widow spiders. They are the most venomous spiders in North America, though their bite is rarely fatal.

On a Sunday in October, three Rose City Bluff Restoration volunteers were working near the tall snag when crows alerted them to a red-tailed hawk sitting on the top of the snag. Soon the hawk dove to the ground at the base of the snag, then came back up to a lower limb. The hawk had a mouse in its beak. Sad for the mouse but lunch for the hawk. This reminded us that seven years ago the area might have been too thickly covered in blackberry brambles for the hawk to hunt there. One day the snag will fall and the hawks will move on and the mice will have better luck. In the meantime we hope we can continue to keep the area free of brambles and that folks who frequent the bluff trails continue to benefit from the community-wide and ongoing effort to provide access to nature on the golf course, however temporary. Here are two views of the snag, 2019 (left), and with fewer branches and less bark, 2024 (right). There are many more woodpecker cavities now than there were in 2019.

A close inspection of trees along the bluff, like the apple tree pictured here, will reveal horizontal lines of small holes. What are they, and how did they get there? Woodpeckers! Woodpeckers are quite varied in how they get their food. Our most common woodpecker on the bluff, the Northern Flicker, is mostly a ground feeder, eating ants while nesting in medium-sized tree cavities. Our smallest woodpecker, the Downy Woodpecker, hunts for bugs in the bark of trees. You can often hear it squeaking on the bluff. It regularly nests in holes not much bigger than a half-dollar. Native to Oregon, but not yet seen on the bluff, the Lewis’s Woodpecker catches insects while flying.

The holes in this tree are the work of our native Red-Breasted Sapsucker. While it has a red breast, its striking red head usually makes it stand out. Sapsuckers drill these wells in trees and wait for the sap to come out, which they drink! Sapsuckers return to these wells year after year for their meals. Not only are they popular with sapsuckers, but other birds, including hummingbirds, will also visit the wells if there is sap to drink. Bugs get stuck in the sap, which makes for what must be a delicious treat. Sapsuckers can be found somewhat regularly along the bluff, and seem to become quite conspicuous during snow storms, maybe because they can still get sap, or maybe because of their brilliant red head. Keep a lookout for their wells and the birds this fall to spring! (Thanks to Trask for this post!)

The bluff is a large mix of native, exotic, invasive, thriving, dying, and just-trying-to-exist plants, animals, fungi, and insects. It’s sort of wild, but it also reflects decades of human intervention, both good and bad. Rose City Bluff Restoration tries not to tame it but to create a semblance of what it might have been when it really was wild. So here we have a European mantis photographed last week on the bluff. It has the perfect scientific name, Mantis religiosa. It’s introduced, not native. Mantis egg cases continue to be sold to gardeners, which seems like a really bad idea to us. You can get them through Amazon. It has a bad rep for eating bees. We come down hard on the side of native plants and pollinators, but should we give a pass to this religiosa? Comments and opinions are welcome.