The wild cucumber...
On one of my dad's visits with us, not long after we moved out to Lawson Valley, he and I took a couple of our dogs on a walk up a little-traveled dirt road that leads uphill for a mile or so from our house. It was the first time he and I had ever walked together in the southern California chaparral, and at that point most of the plants around me were new to me. I knew the manzanitas and the ceanothus, but most of the rest I did not.
My dad's main body of botanical knowledge was not of this area, but he certainly knew a lot more of the plants than I did. He recognized the lemonade berry as a sumac, he knew the toyon, and he recognized the many buckwheat species we have here. Some of our plants, such as chamise, were completely new to him; others, like our evergreen oaks, he knew but not well. As usual, my dad kept spotting more and more plants that I'd never even noticed before. And as always, I learned a lot from him in a very short time.
As we came around one bend, there was a ceanothus right next to the road. It was covered thickly with a vine in bloom (like the photo at right, which is not mine). My dad said “What have we got here?” I told him that the locals called it a wild cucumber, which he dismissed as utter nonsense. That was most definitely not a cucumber!
I have a clear memory of my dad standing next to that ceanothus, carefully studying the vine. Then he spied something on the ground – the remains of last year's seed pod from the same vine, the dried up spiky thing as at left (also not my photo). “Ah ha!” said he, “This is a Marah, a manroot!” To which I said something brilliant like “Huh? What are you talking about?”
If you knew my dad, then you know what came next: a long and detailed lecture on the natural history of the Marah species, absolutely none of which I had previously known. I don't know if he had ever actually seen one before. They certainly didn't grow in the wild on the east coast, nor are they used in horticulture, so it's not the sort of plant you'd expect my dad to know about. I suspect something about it caught his fancy, and he'd read up on the Marah species at some point. It may have been the plant's root that interested him, because he knew a lot about it.
My dad didn't know the particular species he was looking at, but I've since identified it as Marah fabaceus. He did, however, know all about the gigantic roots of these plants – and the evolutionary advantage that root conferred on it. My dad said that the roots could grow to be “as large as a man”, both in height and weight. The photo of one such root is at right (not mine, again). My subsequent reading backs that up: the largest Marah fabaceus root ever dug up weighed just over 110 kg (242 lbs) and was almost 3 m (9 ft) tall. That's a lot of root! And it's a lot of food and water storage for the plant. The water storage is particularly important in a desert plant, and it allows the Marah family to thrive where you might not expect a perennial vine to do well. They are very common here; on our 10 acres we have hundreds of them. Water storage in the roots is a common trait amongst desert flora, but somehow I didn't expect to find that in a perennial vine.
My dad also said that the local native Americans made use of the plant, and that it had something to do with fishing. He was fuzzy on the details. It was many years later that I found a reference to the Kumeyaay tribe (the tribe our local Cuyamaca Mountains were named after) using Marah fabaceus to catch fish. On researching this post, I discovered that bit of natural history is now also in the Wikipedia article. My dad loved to read natural history books, especially older ones; I suspect he came across this little factoid in one of those.
A few years after that walk with my dad, I was using a small backhoe to dig a trench in our yard to lay some pipe in. In the side of my trench I spotted a large root – and I recalled seeing a Marah fabaceus there the year before. The one I dug out was perhaps 3 ft high, and weighed about 60 or 70 lbs. – not a giant (and therefore not particularly old), but still pretty respectable for a plant whose above-ground parts can't weigh more than 8 or 10 lbs.
This morning, while walking our dogs, I spotted a Marah fabaceus vine wending its way up the trunk of one of our pines. The highest stalks of the vine were well over my head, perhaps 10 ft up. Seeing that vine instantly brought back that memory of my dad, lecturing me on the natural history of Marah as we walked slowly up that road by our house. Those sorts of triggered memories are happening to me a lot. Sometimes, as this morning, they're emotionally intense – a trigger for more grieving. This morning, two of our dogs put an abrupt end to that, and in a way that I know would have greatly amused my dad: Miki (our youngest male field spaniel) lifted his leg to pee – and peed all over Race's tail (Race is our hyperactive border collie). My dad loved the couthlessness of dogs, and I laughed out loud thinking of how he'd enjoy that little scene. I had to go wash Race off with a garden hose, but I came in from our walk with a smile instead of a heavy heart...
