Catalina Cherry (Prunus ilicifolia spp lyonii) Photo: Kerry Woods, https://www.flickr.com/photos/93854456@N03/10743643495
By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair & Rare Plants Chair
Another year disappeared somewhere. So, what does 2022 hold?
I’m looking out my window at my neighbor’s majestic queen palm. Its fronds overhang my roof, while its trunk is wrapped in Christmas lights. It’s a festive sight, and with the rain, I don’t have to fret about it catching fire and raining embers down on my roof for a while. And people wonder why I advocate for more native plants in gardens, even though I’m supposed to be fighting CEQA battles?
Now, I’m not actually going to ask my neighbors to lose the palm, because they’re nice people (they put up with me, after all) and it’s a nice enough tree. But it does symbolize the problems we deal with in San Diego.
One problem is that most people haven’t a clue. At a recent meeting about updating the County native plant regulations, a member of the public went off about how firestick plants (Euphorbia tirucalli) were really dangerous and we shouldn’t be promoting these “natives.” Various people calmly told the person that firesticks are African plants, and no, none of us native plant nerds supported planting them.
It’s a common example, but after 50 years of CNPS-SD, that’s where we are right now. It’s not worth getting depressed about it either, because the problem is different than we think.
San Diego residents (including me) mostly moved here from somewhere else. Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, for example, grew up in Arkansas, as I found out when I talked with him. There’s nothing wrong with where he grew up, except that it doesn’t have 1,700 native plant species packed in with 3.3 million people, the way San Diego County does.
Most San Diego transplants therefore don’t understand that what works wonderfully in a place like, say, Arkansas can cause problems here. Indeed, I suspect most of the new arrivals are rather homesick anyway, and they’d rather either recreate a garden from memory, or go out in the woods, drink beer and have a campfire like they did back home. It takes time and effort to explain why campfires and tree swings are forbidden here, especially in local urban parks.
Perhaps our chapter can figure out how to educate all those new arrivals about all the problems they moved into. Any ideas about how to do that?
It’s not an idle question. The County is moving ahead with updating its native plant landscaping ordinances, and we’re facing the predictable blowback and misinformation against it, about how a bunch of environmentalists are going to force everyone to rip out their landscaping to plant weeds and brush, just to give more business to their favorite nurseries and landscapers.
The answer of course (ahem in the back!) is that we’re not doing any of that. I’m not going to force anyone to cut down their palm trees, although their insurance carriers might. We’re just trying to give people more options.
The pitch for growing natives isn’t that they’re more beautiful, for beauty is subjective. It’s that we need plants that are more multifunctional.
The queen palm out my window is too well-pruned to even have a bird’s nest in it. It functions as eye candy and a small amount of sequestered carbon. The Mexican fan palms across the street are at least swarming with finches, so they perform another ecological function—nesting habitat—even though they’re weeds.
But if you want multifunctional, add some unsprayed native oaks, Catalina cherries, or Torrey pines to this coastal urban setting. If you believe Doug Tallamy, you start to get a lot of insects and spiders, which in turn feed insectivorous birds and their chicks. So, plants like these (yes, Catalina cherries, too) are not just homes for bird feeder habitués, they help feed a bigger community of animals and help ameliorate the wildlife food desert that is a modern city or suburb. Properly maintained, the oaks and cherries at least are fairly fire resistant (another function), which helps protect the home. And they all use a lot less water (another function).
So, which do you want, the eye candy or the general store? That’s actually a serious pitch for native landscaping going forward. We’re looking at present and future developments and redevelopments that have smaller backyards, that face daunting fire insurance premiums if they’re anywhere near the wildland urban interface, that need to be water conserving, that need to host trees and large shrubs to sequester carbon, and which support insects and birds to help slow extinction and widen the remaining wildlife corridors a bit.
It’s difficult to do all this with non-native plants, especially in a small space. But we already know how to do it with natives.
This still has a long list of challenges. We’ve got to get the County to write and adopt the guidelines, and then we’ve got to implement them. In our chapter, we need to start figuring out how to reach out to educate all the people who will listen. We also need to get better at small gardens and urban trees. It’s exciting to do parks and big gardens, but that’s not where the need is. And you don’t want someone like me, who thinks that liverworts and grasses are beautiful, to be the point person on getting homeowners excited about planting natives in their homes and HOAs. That’s your job.
So that’s one thing to do in 2022.
Another is that the North County MSCP (ncMSCP) rides again. Yay or something! If you remember last December’s column, this is another project That Is Rocket Science, and I’m afraid it’s being treated as an exercise in fulfilling legal obligations under the state and federal Endangered Species Acts (ESAs). That’s a mistake, because we need the ncMSCP to work on the ground, not just on paper or in the courts and hearing chambers.
Here’s an example of the problem: they want to protect mountain lions, because the southern California mountain lions are likely to be listed under an ESA. That’s great! How do you protect a mountain lion? Well, if you want to do it right, you protect the ecosystem that they depend on, including especially the mule deer. Those who know the South County MSCP know that it protects the coastal mule deer population. This isn’t because mule deer are a listed species, it’s because coastal mule deer absolutely require wildlife corridors, so this was done as a way to keep coastal wildlife corridors open.
Now imagine an MSCP that declares mountain lions protected, but does not protect their main food source (mule deer), or the chaparral and woodland both need (vegetation that’s too common)? Do you think it will successfully protect mountain lions? I don’t. But some in County Planning are just looking at fulfilling their legal requirements, not at doing the hard work of getting all the living parts of this MSCP to survive together for the next 50 years.
Another example are the Nuttall’s scrub oaks, summer hollies, and other rare, long-lived, slow growing plants on the CRPR 1B list. They’re not listed under any ESA, so the County wants to ignore them. Problem is, when and if they get listed, it’s going to take many decades to see if any efforts to save them are working. So, isn’t it better to put them in the MSCP now, so that occasionally someone tries to keep them from getting listed?
Nope. There’s no legal requirement for that. Instead, they want to focus only on plants that are already listed. I’m really wondering how to reach the planners who are doing this. How do you get them to realize, at a deep level, that they’re not pushing papers, that what they’re writing will have real effects, possibly really bad effects?
Part of the problem may be that some (many?) of them were educated outside San Diego. Like all the other transplants, they have little idea what they’ve gotten into. They may come from a state that has fewer people than does San Diego County, and a state flora that’s not much larger than our county flora. Or maybe they don’t know any botany at all. But they’re here to solve our problems for us and to help save the world. How do we educate them?
Yes, that’s our job too. Welcome to 2022.