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The day before St. Patrick’s Day it rained here in Oakland and I thought it would be really wonderful to go traipsing around the lush forest floor of Redwood Regional Park. I knew the rain would make the understory fresh and green and fill the creeks and tributaries, and also unfortunately make the trails muddy, but keep the crowds away. I decided to try some new trails including East Ridge Road and Prince Road, but what I really wanted to explore was more of Tres Sendas Trail. From previous visits I knew that Tres Sendas was flanked by watershed and deep within the shade of redwoods, so it would be particularly nice on a wet cloudy day. My decision paid off as I was rewarded with dozens of blooming trilliums along the path of Tres Sendas. Normally I only see trilliums with their buds munched off by ravenous deer or shriveled up long past their prime. The trillium is a pretty easy wildflower to identify and remember as there are three leaves, three sepals, and three petals... hence the “tri” in trillium. As you can see from the photos above the flower can range in color from white, to pink, to purple. I’ve seen two kinds of trillium in the local redwood forests. One is the Trillium ovatum pictured above, also called Western Wake Robin or Pacific Wake Robin, and the other is Trillium chloropetalum otherwise known as Giant Wake Robin, Giant Trillium, Common Trillium amongst other common names. Coincidently, Tres (as in Tres Sendas) means three in Spanish! Tres Sendas = Three Trails. Unfortunately, I was only able to explore the lower half of Tres Sendas as I took a wrong turn on French Trail and spent too much time lollygagging, and so chose a more familiar trail to return to the trailhead insuring that I got back to my car before dark. My Links:
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Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Trillium of Tres Sendas
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Nice photos. Trilliums are one of my favorites.
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