Matrimony vine and Hanford a match made in heaven
It's as if the plant species is living out the age-old vow, "For better or worse."
The wiry shrubs with tiny purple flowers and itsy-bitsy red fruits have endured more than 60 years, through ovenlike summers, wildfires, sand-blasting windstorms, zero-degree winters, droughts and lack of any irrigation or care from the experienced hand of an agriculturist.
Long after they were planted by original settlers of the communities of Hanford and White Bluffs between 100 and 60 years ago, the matrimony vine continues to eke out an existence in the natural surroundings of an arid and forsaken landscape.
"It's a double whammy out here," said Bill Rickard, a botanist who has spent decades traipsing over the shrub steppe soils at Hanford as an environmental scientist for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory before retiring a few years ago.
Rickard, who now works part time, and his field sidekick, lab scientist Robin Durham, are the matrimony-vine experts at Hanford.
"Bill was the one who first noticed it," Durham said recently while driving a Ford Excursion across the dusty road leading to what had been the main street into the town of Hanford more than 50 years ago.
Sand covers much of what was, but the sidewalks stand out because of the plants that have grown along the concrete edges. The occasional Russian olive tree, honey locust tree, cottonwood, black locust tree or Siberian elm stand as evidence of past human habitation.
A scrap of rusty metal from a pre-World War II automobile or truck, bits of coiled wire that once bound wooden irrigation pipes and a weathered stone building that had been a community bank are slowly disintegrating.
But not the matrimony vine.
"There's one," said Durham, stopping.
The vine, which is actually a shrub, resembles a gigantic dehydrated chia plant or an oversized sea urchin having a bad-hair day.
The shrub is about 2 feet in diameter, 18 inches tall with sticklike branches thick with leaves, pointing in all directions, making an ideal hiding place for small birds or snakes. Tiny purplish flowers and an occasional red fruit populate the shrub. Bees like it, too.
The vine is a member of the nightshade family, a cousin to potatoes, Rickard explained. Its proper name, or genus, is lycium, and it's native to the Gobi Desert in China.
So how did it end up at Hanford?
Rickard isn't certain, but he thinks the plants likely were brought to the Mid-Columbia by settlers as an ornamental plant starting shortly after 1900.
Even more remarkably, Rickard and Durham suspect that Hanford's matrimony-vine plants, of which there are at least 55, probably are originals.
Eastern Washington's desert landscape has few native plants because of the extremes in weather and temperatures, Rickard said.
Although the matrimony vine produces seeds in the fall, the winters typically are too cold and too long, the summers too hot and too short, and there is too little water to encourage a successful germination.
Although the desert landscape can appear to be empty to the untrained observer, Rickard and Durham are eager to point out clusters of yarrow, a lone catalpa tree, a line of mulberry trees, sagebrush in bloom and bunches of yellow-tufted rabbit brush.
A sign cautions on approaching a curlew nesting area, and visitors are reminded that the entire region is hands-off. "Everything out here is a cultural relic," said Durham as she led a short walk toward the foundation of a home site, where broken pottery, porcelain tinware and miscellany trash lay undisturbed.
Not far away, the remains of an old orchard resemble a scrawny graveyard.
As expected, near the foundation close to where the front door to the home could have been, a matrimony vine displays its October greenery.
Rickard couldn't believe it when he first saw one of the plants in the fields of Hanford in the 1960s.
"I was even more surprised that it was still there the next year," he said.
The drought-resistant matrimony vine is more than hardy. Deer won't eat it, and fire can't destroy it.
Durham tells the story about another lab staff member who interviewed a woman who grew up in the White Bluffs area before the federal government ordered the settlers out of the region in the 1940s to create a secret place in the desert to develop the atomic bomb.
The woman couldn't find her childhood home because everything human-made was long gone. Then she saw and recognized the matrimony vine her parents had planted.
"She realized then where the house had been, and the memories all came back," Durham said.
"They really are a cultural relic," said Durham as she led the way to another matrimony vine.
Matrimony vines have been mapped, using Global Positioning System locators, at 50 former home sites.
Durham said the plants are rooted to where settlers built their homes and planted shade trees decades ago.
"Bill has a theory that wherever there is a tree, you'll find a matrimony vine," Durham said.
So far, the theory has held.