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IN THE FIELD: Corte Madera Mountain

By Tom Oberbauer

Back in January of 1978, I hiked up onto Corte Madera Mountain with a friend, Tom Scott (now with UC Berkeley and UC Riverside), who had been studying Golden Eagles in San Diego County. Bald Eagles were wintering at Corte Madera Lake. After postponing the hike due to rain, that was a good rain season, we drove out to Corte Madera Lake, which was accessible because Tom Scott had a key, and we hiked up the north side of Corte Madera Mountain on a little used trail. The trail climbed through a woodland of mostly coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia), but also Coulter pine (Pinus coulteri), as well as Jeffrey pine (Pinus jeffreyi). It was foggy going up and the view was obscured.

IN THE FIELD: Corte Madera Mountain
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In The Field: The New Santa Fe Valley Trail

By Jürgen Schrenk

Recently, the new Santa Fe Valley Trail, connecting the San Dieguito River Park’s Del Dios Gorge Trail with the Lusardi Creek Preserve, was opened to the public. The beginning of the trail took us through fields of Menzies’ Goldenbush (Isocoma menziesii var. menziesii).

In The Field: The New Santa Fe Valley Trail
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The Desert a Month after Monsoonal Rains

By Jürgen Schrenk

After yet another week of waiting for the temps to go down watching our Monarch production and limiting our walks to local parks, I was worried that I might completely miss the monsoonal “spring” in the desert. So, I went on a quick drive along S-2

The Desert a Month after Monsoonal Rains
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CNPS-SD Helps With Rare Plant Surveys

By Justin Daniel, Vice President, Rare Plants Co-chair

With vaccinations allowing more contact outdoors and a workload a year behind, it's been a busy time a few of us to help some of our fantastic environmental conservancy organizations around San Diego County by assisting them in their rare plant surveys. The following are glimpses into some of the recent surveys. Come along for the ride and reach out to support our partners, too!

CNPS-SD Helps With Rare Plant Surveys
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The Mount Laguna Surprise

By Tom Oberbauer

…The next week, I drove up and hiked to the location I visited in December and sure enough, the display of Platystemon californica (above) was pretty amazing. Sheets of color extended across the slopes leading into the center of the meadow. I spent some time attempting to photograph and create video of the breeze gently shaking the small flowers. From this location, the view of the meadow ranges across its full length, extending more than three miles in the distance to the south. Laguna Lake also contained a good level of water reflecting the blue sky, apparently left over from the previous two good rainfall seasons. I attempted to capture the view of the flowers with the lake and end of the meadow in the distance. The breeze and the movement of the flowers in this manner always reminds me of when I was a child and my family visited Estes Park in Colorado and we observed alpine wildflowers…

The Mount Laguna Surprise

trichostema lanatum

Woolly Bluecurls (Trichostema lanatum)

By Bobbie Stephenson, Newsletter Editor

Woolly Bluecurls naturally occurs in the coastal chaparral on the dry slopes of the Coast Ranges from Monterey and San Benito Counties of California, south to Northern Baja California. Woolly Bluecurls gets its common name from the colorful (white to purple) woolly hairs that cover the stems and calyces. It also has woolly white hairs on the undersides of the narrow aromatic leaves, which are shiny green above.

Photo: Dick Culbert, https://www.flickr.com/photos/92252798@N07/27289259804

This highly fragrant, small evergreen shrub or sub-shrub in the Lamiaceae (Mint family) likes full sun and blooms from spring to summer.

The bloom period can extend into fall with a little supplemental summer watering, but only give it summer water if the soil drains well. Woolly Bluecurls makes a great cut flower; note the long silky recurved stamens on the flowers in the photo to the left.

Do not amend the soil or fertilize heavily.

The petals are fused to form a slender tube. Nectar at the bottom of the tube is accessible only to long-tongued pollinators like hummingbirds, large bees and the long-tongued larger butterflies.

Installation of California Native Plants and Notes on Pollinators

Installation of California Native Plants and Notes on Pollinators

A Conversation on the CNPS-San Diego Listserv

Compiled by Mike Gonzales, Founding Member, San Diego Pollinator Alliance and Former Chairperson, CNPS-San Diego Garden Committee

Can restoring our yards into native urban gardens, albeit very difficult to do given the nature of urban yards, help San Diego’s endemic plants survive and thrive?

Believe me, I understand the part about not being easy! I’ve been stumbling around my front and back yards for 20+ years sluggishly transforming iceplant-covered slopes into some semblance of a native urban garden, or at least semi-native at this point. I thought Wayne Tyson was joking when he posted on the CNPS-SD listserv that, “it's as easy as duplicating the conditions [or functionally mimicking them] under which indigenous ecosystems function.” Well, maybe it was just tongue-in-cheek as he followed up with, “That can be difficult, but it's not impossible, especially the mimicking part [due to] the site conditions that one has to begin with, but it can be done.”

This post epitomizes the macrocosm of my ongoing quest-to create something that hopefully might be considered a decent foundation for, as Wayne puts it, “preserving indigenous germplasm while not sacrificing beauty or utility, and further minimizing the use of imported water and nutrients from other places.” I know, this certainly sounds like a lofty goal, but I’ve been having fun at it – thanks to all the wonderful information streaming across the list-serve from very knowledgeable people whose advice I deeply respect.

Ok, so if you don’t mind too much I’d like to take a slight detour here, as I feel I should at least try to understand what Wayne means when he refers to the term ‘germplasm’. I’m guessing it may have something to do with what both Wayne and Greg Rubin refer to as “the mycorrhizal net (i.e., the natural soil-crust community of algae, mosses, and other cryptobiotic/cryptogamic soil-crust plant communities[1] which are fireproof, erosion-protectors, and infiltration-facilitators).Symbiotic benefits of a mycorrhizal net include disease resistance, pest resistance, and increased availability of moisture. Absence of a mycorrhizal net (and many other microbial constituents of the indigenous microbiome) is a contributor to weed growth, as most weeds are not obligately mycorrhizal; in fact, their presence may inhibit their formation.”