Things That Go Crunch In The Bark
By Frank Landis, Chairperson Conservation Committee
There's something about reading about Polyphagous Shot Hole Borers and commenting on the North County Multiple Species Conservation Program (MSCP) that just inspire me. Sadly, I'm not sure anyone will appreciate what I'm thinking about.
Probably most of you are aware of the Shot Hole Borers (http://ucanr.edu/sites/pshb/ is the easiest source of information). There are two species that are physically indistinguishable, but which are genetically distinct and come from different parts of Asia. In San Diego County, we have the Kuroshio Shot Hole Borer (Euwallacea sp. I'm still looking for the specific epithet. Let's call it KSHB), and it also has been found in Orange County and Santa Barbara as well. Up in LA and Ventura, they have the Polyphagous Shot Hole Borer (also Euwallacea sp. I'm still looking for the specific epithet, and I don't think it has one either. We'll dub it PSHB).
The problem with these two non-native beetle species is that they like to burrow into the trunks of trees, and like other ambrosia beetles, these tiny pests –they're about the size of a comma or a period on paper—bring their own species of fungi with them (Fusarium euwallaceae and a Graphium species). These fungi, along with the beetle galleries in the trunk, kill the trees.
General Statement on Ants
By Greg Rubin, CNPS-San Diego Garden Native Committee member
Many people have been experiencing problems with many native species, such as Ceanothus, manzanita, mallow-like plants, and mounding perennials. One of the primary causes, surprisingly, appears to be invasion by Argentine ants! The increasingly hot, monsoonal weather of recent years greatly promotes them. What these ants are doing is placing insects like scale and aphids all over the ROOTS, which literally suck the life out of the plant from below, often undetected to those without the experience to pick up on the subtle clues...
Argentine ants appear to be responsible for other horticultural threats. They plant innumerable types of weeds, including Veldt grass, spotted spurge, petty spurge, purslane, scarlet pimpernel, chickweed, brass buttons, and dandelion, as well as natives like Miner’s lettuce and Purple three awn grass (they’re not very picky). Often massive infestations of weeds can be associated with ant activity; they give themselves away by the weeds they plant.
An additional concern, of grave consequence, is that these same ants may be spreading pathogens like Phytophthora. This is especially significant as there are virtually no treatments available for these water molds (Sudden Oak Death is just one example of this devastating group of pathogens).
New CNPS-SD Internet TV Show- Go Native!
Native Plant Week proclamation in San Diego
The City of San Diego declares April 17-23, 2017 Native Plant Week.
Pictured left to right: Torrey Neel, CNPS-SD Board member; Barbara Bry, District 1 San Diego Councilmember; Frank Landis, CNPS-SD Conservation chair; Kye Ok Kim, CNPS-SD Hospitality chair
Miller Mountain
By Tom Oberbauer, Vice President CNPS-San Diego
The far northern part of San Diego County includes land that is north of Camp Pendleton under the ownership of the Cleveland National Forest. A portion of the Cleveland National Forest is the San Mateo Wilderness Area, a series of canyons including Devil’s Canyon. In Riverside County, several volcanic plateaus exist, including Mesa de Colorado and Mesa de Burro. These are volcanic plateaus consisting of a cap of volcanic rock that was laid down during the upper Miocene (8 million years ago, Kennedy 1977). The once continuous mesa formed by the volcanic flow was divided by erosion into a series of separate mesas. Nearly all of them are located in Riverside County, except one, Miller Mountain. The peak is 2,953 feet, with a mesa portion at 2,946 feet in elevation.
Another interesting fact is that the Santa Rosa Basalt volcanic rock is the home of Brodiaea santarosae (Santa Rosa Basalt brodiaea), a species that was described in 2007 (Chester, Armstrong and Madore 2007). It has characteristics that indicate it is clearly related to the federally threatened state Brodiaea filifolia (thread-leafed brodiaea), but it has longer flowers and grows bigger plus many have long filamentous staminodia but sometimes none at all.
The Brodiaea was one of the reasons that I have been interested in visiting the area, besides the fact that it is in a remote part of San Diego County that I have never seen.
Exploring Seldom Visited Areas of the Restoration
By Arne Johanson, Co-Chairperson Habitat Restoration Committee
We were to have an adventure – just two boys going out alone in uncharted territory. Andy is a 5-year old neighbor and this was our first time out with just the two of us. His mother packed water and a snack in his backpack. He added sunglasses and a notepad just like he has seen grownups do. Then we went exploring in some seldom visited parts of a 400-acre open space that our CNPS group has restored.
PLANT OF THE MONTH: Red Buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens)
Busy Spring: Del Mar Mesa Development 1 and Mission Trails Revamp
By Frank Landis, Chairperson Conservation Committee
Wow, what a busy winter. As I write this, I'm checking the news periodically to see whether the Oroville Dam fails, or whether the engineers keep the Sacramento Valley from trying to turn back into the "Inland Sea" it was before the 1920s. This is hopefully irrelevant, but I have my doubts, because I'm reading the EIR for Merge 56, the first development slated for the eastern edge of Del Mar Mesa. The problem isn't particularly a CNPS concern. Their design, as I feared, has Deer Creek routed through a basin and storm drain through a pile of fill, and because the channel at that point makes a "Z," the culvert turns at a sharp angle from the upstream and downstream flows. Atop that fill is the southward extension of Camino Del Sur. I've protested this design for years, because most of the watershed above Deer Creek is paved over by Rancho Peñasquitos. As a result, we don't really know how high that creek can flood. While we can make some guesses based on 100 year floods and so forth, I keep wondering how it will handle a tropical storm or hurricane, or even a big atmospheric river getting weepy. Presumably their system will clog and the water will start chewing through the fill holding up Camino Del Sur. If the road/dam breaches, all the crap goes down canyon, chewing up those Nuttall's scrub oaks I've been trying to protect for years. Nothing big like Oroville, but as with the Oroville Dam's problems, which were predicted by environmental groups in 2005 (and ignored), it's a fairly predictable disaster.
Weeding, or The Story of Bob Smith and Sondra Boddy’s California Native Garden – Part Three
By Sondra Boddy, CNPS-San Diego Garden Native Committee Member
With over 16 inches of rain since October, everything in our California native garden is growing – including a bumper crop of weeds! Before we can sit back and enjoy the spectacular spring wildflower display, we are working on getting rid of these annoying trespassers. Hand-weeding is our preferred eradication method in late winter, when the ground is soft and the weeds are large enough to be pulled out from the roots. Pulling weeds might not be your idea of fun, but it is very important and there are ways to make it easier and more enjoyable. It can even be good for you. How? Read on, California Native DIY Gardeners!
Eradicating weeds is important not only because it improves the appearance of your garden, but also because it promotes the health of your garden. Non-native or “naturalized” species are genetically programmed to compete with native species; they usually grow and bloom faster, blocking out sunlight and hogging water and nutrients. If left unchecked, weeds can damage or even kill oaks and other native flora by disrupting the fragile fungal network in the soil which allows native plants to share resources and support one another. Pulling weeds promotes good “garden hygiene,” which is essential to building a vibrant California native garden.
Before you wade out into the sea of green meanies, here are some general pointers
So the County got sued again, and...
By Frank Landis, Chairperson Conservation Committee
Despite what some may think, I'm not anything like an inside player in local politics. As the latest example, I found out that the Sierra Club and the Cleveland National Forest Foundation are each suing San Diego County again by reading about it online at the UT San Diego. CNPSSD is not involved in either lawsuit, of course--you would have heard about it otherwise. Still, these two suits are part of the difficult struggle we're all facing as San Diego grapples with diverging pressures to decarbonize, to grow, to build huge numbers of affordable homes, and to not destroy what's left of our environment. While I don't know much more about the suits than what is in the newspaper article, I do know a bit about the surrounding conditions, and that's the topic of this essay.
Iris douglasiana
Photo by David Clarke
““Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.” ”
PLANT OF THE MONTH: Southwestern Spiny Rush (Juncus acutus)
Farewell to Dichelostemma?
By Fred Roberts, Rare Plant Botanist, CNPS-San Diego
Yes, the name Dichelostemma may soon be a history note in San Diego County and the rest of southern California. The genus Dichelostemma will not be going away, it just won't apply to the plants we have known as blue dicks, school bells or wild hyacinth.
I am writing this in Sacramento to the sound of pounding rain, returning from a two-day symposium hosted by the Northern California Botanists. Not many of you, perhaps none of you, have been to one of these excellent symposiums typically held in early January at Chico, California. It is a good long drive from San Diego. The symposium was held over January 9th and 10th. The drive to get to it and back was also an excellent opportunity to sample the atmospheric river that had been making news and apparently beating at my hotel window.
At the symposium's poster session this morning, a poster presented by a prominent northern California botanist and contributor to the Jepson Manual, Robert Preston, caught my eye. Currently, Preston has been focusing some attention on Brodiaea and related groups. The poster was titled: “Not another Damn Name Change! Why Blue Dicks is not a Dichelostemma”.
Dichelostemma capitatum already has a bit of a checkered history. It has been called variously Hookeria puchella, Brodiaea pulchella, and Dichelostemma pulchella. All three names, as Preston explains, have ultimately been shown to be incorrectly applied to this plant and the name that appeared in the 1993 edition of the Jepson manual was Dicholostemma capitatum. Many of you familiar with Latin names may only have known blue dicks by this latter name. Those of us that spent our formative botany years clutching a Munz book knew this plant as D. pulchella.
Mr. Preston made a compelling argument that we should be using Dipterostemon capitatus for this plant. The name is already available and was proposed by Per Axel Rydberg in 1912. Apparently no one took Rydberg or his name seriously, as you can hardly find reference to it. I'd certainly never heard of it. However, recent researchers have found genetic and embryologic evidence that suggest Rydberg was right on the mark. Will the botanical community at large accept this new name with old roots? Very likely they will.
Image: Dawn Endico from Menlo Park, California, Dichelostemma capitatum, 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0
Great challenges, greater accomplishments
By Arne Johanson, Chairperson Habitat Restoration Committee, CNPS-San Diego
Last month I provided an overview of our efforts. This month I will focus on just one, the San Dieguito River. While nowhere near the finish line, we have certainly accomplished much to get to this point. First, we trained and licensed volunteers who then earned the trust of USFW and the several property owners through our efforts at other sites. With our partners we obtained all of the permits to work in the river. Then we only had to obtain right of entry for some 6-10 parcels before initiating work.
Sondra Boddy and Bob Smith’s California native garden – chapter one
By Sondra Boddy, CNPS-San Diego Garden Native Committee member
“Holy cow,” I thought, “there’s a bobcat in my backyard!” I watched as she emerged stealthily from the dense foliage, deftly clamped her jaws around an unwitting Mourning Dove, then trotted off into the wildlands with her limp prize. The thrill of seeing this elusive animal stalking prey on our property in broad daylight made the months of hard work all seem worth it.
Promoting biodiversity, re-creating wildlife habitat and re-connecting with nature were primary motivations for planting California natives on our 1+ acre property up in the hills west of Lake Hodges. To our delight, it was working. Admittedly, conserving water was a key driver for us as well. Faced with a $430 water bill in June 2013 after our first month in the house, we knew that the expansive lawn and overgrown non-native vegetation had to go.