Ballhead Waterleaf, Hydrophyllum capitatum.

My wife and I took a quick trip up the Umatilla River last weekend to check out what may be in bloom there. Had we known the degree of ongoing reconstruction we would not have gone there, and we don’t encourage others to. The degree of flood damage was rather sobering, with road repair, huge logs piled up, and homes damaged. The flood aftermath is hard to imagine.

We were nearly to the Bar M Ranch before seeing anything blooming, when the cliff face along the road presented some colorful respite from the devastation. There were five flowering plants in bloom or nearly so, in addition to horsetails. Here are descriptions of them:

Gorman’s Saxifrage (Micranthes gormanii – formerly Saxifraga gormanii): This plant is about a foot tall, with half-inch flowers bearing five white petals and a yellow center. Each stem has a smooth-edged, single, oval leaf at the base.

Common monkeyflower (Erythranthe guttata – formerly Mimulus guttatus): This is by far the most common monkeyflower in the Northwest region. Named for someone’s imagination that the bilateral faces of the flowers in the genus looked like the face of a monkey, all the species in the “monkeyflower” genus bear that common name. The plant loves wet soil or rocks, and is often in crevices of cliffs with water seeping down the cliff, as with this photo.

Purple deadnettle (Lamium purpureum): This little mint plant is fairly common along the Umatilla River, often growing on road banks or gravel, or at the base of a cliff. As with most plants in the mint family, it has square stems. It is a native of Europe and Asia and looks like nothing else I know of. The purple-tinged, fuzzy leaves are only at the stem top, and the flowers peek out from under the leaves, as one small pink flower in the photo is starting to do. The plant is usually about 6-12 inches high.

Ballhead Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum capitatum): One of my annual early favorites is this common plant in the Umatilla Forks area. Each spring, once the uniquely shaped leaves have spread open, the flowering stem produces a terminal spherical cluster of pale blue-purple flowers. The cluster is 1-2 inches in diameter, and is held together by a tightly coiled tip of the stem. Look first for the large deeply cleft leaves on or near the ground along road banks. The bluish clusters are often hidden by the leaves.