(I found this large round growth, which when dry closely resembles a dried gourd, on a garry oak [Quercus garryana]
at the Fort Eaton monument. It's an immunoreaction to the larvae of a tiny parasitic wasp, and is one of hundreds of these ping-pong-to-tennis-ball-sized globes that litter the branches and ground in the oak grove there.
When dried, oak apples yield a brown powder that's almost pure tannin, and was an important industrial resource in times past. Apart from tanning and dyeing, it was an essential ingredient of most quality ink produced from the invention of the pen through the 19th century. Iron gall ink continues to outperform many modern competitors, and is still used by calligraphers, among others.)
Appearing also on
My Corner of the World.
(When settlers first came here, most of the Puget Sound Basin was prairie, in two configurations: grassland, with few trees, and parkland, covered with Garry oak [Quercus garryana]. As I've mentioned elsewhere, oak trees are perishing rare on the West Coast of North America, and that, plus the fact that these oak-covered savannahs support greater biodiversity than any other ecosystem in the region, has garnered a lot of commentary over the years.
Prairie is not, however, a natural phenomenon in these parts; for millennia the entire 1000-mile habitat was maintained by the First Nations via strategic firing. When the newcomers prevented them from continuing, it largely vanished under an invasive forest dominated by Douglas fir [Pseudotsuga menziesii]. Post-war over-development has all but erased what remained.
So today very little of the oak prairie that once stretched unbroken from Central California into British Columbia is left; none, to my knowledge, is protected. Including this 40-to-80 acre example, on the plat of a massive new retirement estate.)
(On this site stood one of the first homesteads in the neck of Thurston County, Washington, where I grew up. During the Blockhouse Wars of the 1850s – a string of skirmishes touched off by settler abuse of First Nations treaties – the Eaton place hosted one of the tiny wooden stockades for which the era is named. I'm told the ruins of "Fort Eaton" endured well into the 20th century.
The marker was placed, not by any government organism, but by the Freedom Community, a Christian commune established nearby later in the l9th century. It too succumbed to entropy, but persisted as an ordinary village for decades thereafter.
When I was a kid this monument was all but lost under Scotch broom, baldhip rose, and Garry oak, beside a county highway that began life as the main wagon road between Oregon and Puget Sound. While reading history at university I found the plaque by the ancient oak beside it, which I was told was the local hangin' tree. [Oaks are rare on the North Coast; their presence on the Salish Prairie in great number was and remains much remarked.]
In the decades since someone has cleared a respectable little rest stop around the marker, rendering it much easier to find.)
