Dodder

Posted on May 24, 2005 in Plants

Readers might wonder why, as of late, I have not written much about nature. That is because this is the boring time of year. Every cloud has cleared the sky. You look up and there is blue sky. A light haze or smog obscures the mountains. The grasses that jumped out of the soil last January have browned. A fungus called dodder covers the chaparral. It’s too damned hot to go out until evening.

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Dodder isn’t your usual sort of fungus. It doesn’t cling to rotting wood, make a shelf for itself while it splits open the hearts of trees, or lurk under ground, shooting up mushrooms when the ground is moist and the temperature just right. A pale orange mess of strings crawls over the tops of the buckwheat and other perennial chaparral plants. Think of forkfulls of hay, randomly thrown here and there, always on the tops of plants and never on the ground. The color, however, is more like the flesh of cooked winter squashes: you might be tempted to eat it. I do not know, however, if it is edible.

When I went for a walk at a park overlooking Whiting Ranch Wilderness, messes of the stuff splashed over the opposing hillsides. They looked like they’d been dry-brushed there by a Van Gogh.