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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

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Prehistoric San Diego County, Part 2

Prehistoric San Diego County, Part 2

By Tom Oberbauer, CNPS-SD President

Coast

The cool west wind blew across the broad mesa several miles west of the dark pine covered ridge of what is now Point Loma. The vegetation was a mix of Artemisia californica (California sagebrush), Eriogonum fasciculatum (California buckwheat) and Eriogonum giganteum (Island buckwheat) and Ceanothus (wild lilac) shrubs, and prairie habitat. The grass was dominated by Stipa species but was blended with a lot of wildflowers, including butter yellow Layia platyglossa (Tidy tips), purple Castilleja spp. (Owl’s clover), blue and white Lupinus spp. (lupines) and the bright orange Eschscholzia californica (California poppy). The color of the flowers was brilliant under the hazy sun.  A herd of North American Stilt-legged llama grazed in the midst of the color, bending their long necks to feed on the grasses. They were more slender than modern Llamas in South America and built for speed. The afternoon breeze fluffed the fur of these animals as a couple of them stood holding their heads high, watching for predators.  Down the bluff below, the ocean swell created a dull roar and foamy spray.  

Why Container Gardening Matters for Conservation

Why Container Gardening Matters for Conservation

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee

It was good to see so many people at the garden tour and at the April general meeting. Being the contrarian that I am, I wanted to flag something we don't do enough of, and argue that it's important. What we don't do is to help people set up container gardens for native plants. Most of our work focuses on in-the-ground gardening, and for good reason. But there's this problem. It's typically a few years out of college, happy to finally at least have a balcony on the apartment or a yard bigger than a surfboard. This problem thinks that native gardening might be cool, buys a white sage at a garden sale, puts it in a pot, watches it die, decides they can't grow native plants, and goes onto some other hobby.

Does this story seem familiar? I've not only heard it, I've lived it, and while I never grew white sage in a pot (mostly because it grows in my mom's yard), I've heard quite a few variations on it over the years.

There are numerous reasons why this is a conservation problem. First and foremost, CNPS members tend to be older, wealthier, and whiter than the population of California as a whole. What we think of as "normal"—having a garden to landscape, being able to take long vacations, comfortably hiking in the back country, are privileges that many people simply don't have. Some things we can do, like leading more field trips and targeting our advertisements where people outside our normal demographics look for fun. Others, like giving everybody a big back yard to garden in, are less possible every passing year. This isn't just about the housing crisis, it's about the sprawl crisis, and it's something I have to deal with in conservation all the time.

Prehistoric San Diego County, Part 1

Prehistoric San Diego County, Part 1

By Tom Oberbauer, CNPS-SD President

Introduction

Much evidence exists that during the Pleistocene the vegetation in the Southwest of North America was composed of trees and shrubs that require much more precipitation than currently falls here. Some of the evidence is based on the patterns of existing vegetation including isolated and disjunct populations and consideration of prehistoric distribution of plants influenced them. Other evidence is based on fossil woodrat middens which contain plant parts that can be identified as representing the vegetation from thousands of years ago. Fossil evidence also exists for times ranging from the past few million years when the climate was wet enough to provide for native members of the genus Persea (Avocado) with Pinus torreyana (Torrey pine) and Pinus radiata (Monterey pine) and Palms growing with them (Axelrod and Deméré 1984) to closer to 10,000 years ago when forests existed in coastal Southern California (Axelrod and Govean 1996). Fossil evidence also exists that indicates an extremely diverse fauna of large animals that fed on the vegetation supported by greater levels of precipitation.

Best tips from experienced CA native plant gardener Joan Bockman

Joan, what are your 3 best tips for planting native plants?

  • I always start by telling people to take a hike. Literally. You need to find that place you love. For me it was Torrey Pines Reserve because my native San Diegan husband had no idea what was native. So we started hiking and learned about Coastal Sage Scrub. I've been planting that habitat ever since in coastal Oceanside. A great view is from the Coaster south of Sorrento Valley. You come into Rose Canyon and it is exactly the way San Diego mesas and the creek valley should be.
  • Dig a hole exactly the size of the pot. Fill it with water and let it drain before planting. While working with a group at the Buena Vista Audubon Nature Center, we had a debate about how much water to put in the planting hole. The best way to describe it was to have chocolate icing in the bottom of the hole but not chocolate pudding.
  • Plant stuff and see how it does. You are starting on a journey, not finishing a job. You will learn more and wonder why you did some things early on. I have never used fertilizer in old yards or forgotten places. Some of my coyote bush ground cover is pruned by cars running over it on a corner.

Protect Rural Lands to Protect Nature and people: Support “SOS”

By Kay Stewart and Susan Lewitt

As Earth Day approaches, please keep in mind the ripple effect: everything you do affects the planet, from wild plant and animal biodiversity, to our own health. The more we change our planet, the harder it is for most wild species of plants and animals to survive.

One of our biggest impacts is when farms and ranches are converted to housing, and the co-existing plants andwildlife are wiped out. San Diego’s rural land issupposed to be protected from subdividing into small home lots by the County General Plan that allows adding up to 50,000 new homes by expanding theseveral dozen rural “villages”, not by dividing large ruralparcels that are far from major roads. The villages already have services that homeowners need: water, utilities, fire protection, larger roads, and schools. And the impact on wild animals and plants is reduced to the boundaries of the villages, rather than converting intact rural lands that frequently include native habitat.

But land speculators can make huge profits converting those distant rural lands. They mislead people by sayingthat “we need housing.” They don’t want people torealize that the County General Plan allows newhousing. Please read this April issue’s Conservation News about one speculator’s plan that threatens a large rural area. If you act by April 9, you could help prevent it from happening.

The public shouldn’t have to leap into action every timea new speculator wants to violate the General Plan. So a huge alliance of over 20 San Diego area groups areworking to get an initiative called “SOS – Save Our SanDiego Countryside” on the Fall ballot. This initiativewould require every proposed General Plan amendment to automatically go to a public County- wide vote.

The petitions to put the initiative on the ballot must be turned in by May 1. If you have not signed a petitionalready, and you’d like to, or want to help gathersignatures, send a note to conservation@cnpssd.org. If“SOS” gets on the ballot and passes, it may be able to stop sprawl. The benefit to San Diegans includes reduced greenhouse gas output from excessive commuting, reduced fire risks by reducing long strands of powerlines over wildlands, and reduced direct destruction of San Diego’s native animals and plants. CNPS cares.

HELP! (Your Conservation Activities for Native Plant Month)

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee

Yes, it's really Native Plant WEEK, April 15-21, 2018, but we need a month of work this year. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there are things you need to do to help CNPSSD conservation this month. I'm going to highlight some of the same things that Susan and Kay did in their article that follows this one. Unfortunately for nature, they are not the only things going on right now.

To be blunt, this is the busiest I've ever been as conservation committee chair. Here is what the conservation committee is dealing with, as of St. Patrick's Day

Holed is Beautiful

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee 

This was inspired by the opening plenary talk by Dr. Doug Tallamy at the 2018 CNPS Conservation Talk. If you were there, hopefully this will look vaguely familiar.

If you don't want to read this column, here's the gist: ecosystem ecology. If you like birds in your yard, most of our birds get their protein from invertebrates, which depend ultimately on plants.  Therefore, if you want more birds breeding successfully in your neighborhood, you need to grow more bird food, and that means...having more native plants in your yard. But it's not quite that simple. Here's why:

The basic biology may actually surprise people: many, perhaps most, birds need more protein than they get from plants. The adults may get by on seeds (at least when seeds are available), but their chicks need bugs to get the protein they need to reach maturity. Dr. Tallamy even had a heart-breaking picture of a failed chickadee nest with dead chicks surrounded by birdseed from nearby feeders. In the absence of bugs, the chickadee parents had tried in desperation to feed their chicks bird seed. It didn't work. 

Rocking Out on Lake Hodges: Garden Tour MPG (Multi-Purpose Garden)

Rocking Out on Lake Hodges: Garden Tour MPG (Multi-Purpose Garden)

An interview with owners Joe and Laurie Ferguson

Driving just a road snippet up from Lake Hodges, one doesn’t enter the tour garden, MPG (Multi-Purpose Garden) from a front yard. Instead a back street will open onto a separate property behind the house. The owners, Joe and Laurie Ferguson purchased a half-acre lot behind their house, a completely bare space, to create an area for their 3 small children with no playgrounds in the neighborhood. After doing some major grading with the soil to create a flat play area, they tried tropical plants and banana trees, but nothing really fit.

Then, Joe ran into Greg Rubin, the renowned California native plant landscaper in San Diego County. The Fergusons were about to put in the same 20 landscaping plants you see across San Diego but Greg persuaded them to try California natives. And thus 600 native plants were installed in 2001.

The Fergusons did and continue to do 95% of the work of planting, watering, and maintenance. For them “it is fun, a way to get away from the kids” they say, laughing. Laurie would point out areas in the garden that could become a design feature. She is the originator of many of the built-out garden features. As the ideas grew it became “Now let’s do this, now let’s do this.” Today, viewing the expansive landscape filled out with native plants and still including the flat play space, the hard work has paid off richly.

Scaling Mt. VTP Again

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee 

This month I wanted to go over my experience of the Board of Forestry's (BoF) Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP) Programmatic Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). It's the fourth time this PEIR has been sent out since 2013, the third time I've written and submitted a letter for CNPSSD.

Working on this document is always an exercise in repression, because it is impossible to read through it without becoming furious at something. For the third go-round in 2016, about half of us commenting on that version found from commiserating that we could only work on it for a few hours a day, due to either heartburn or stomachaches from holding it in.

But why? That's what I wanted to go through here. Some basic facts are not in dispute, but the fury-inducing question of Why! is something those of us who work on it continue to speculate on.

Botany in San Diego County before European Contact

Botany in San Diego County before European Contact

By Tom Oberbauer, President CNPS-San Diego

It is fascinating to contemplate the appearance and distribution of biological natural resources in San Diego County at the time of the first European contact. Because San Diego County is now one of the more populous counties in the U.S., it is sometimes difficult to imagine what it looked like a mere 500 years ago. All the land that is now covered by urbanization and agriculture was originally natural and inhabited by a wide array of plants and animals and what is more interesting is that our ever present Mediterranean weeds were not here. Just imagine land without Avena fatua (wild oats) and brome grasses (Bromus madritensis, B. hordeadeus and B. diandrus) and the ever present Red-stem filaree (Erodium cicutarium). Their absence means that other species already existed in the areas that they now inhabit. When considering the combination of land that is converted to urban and agricultural lands and the land that is inhabited by non-native weeds, a very large area of San Diego has very different land cover than what originally occurred here.

Can San Diego Grow Up?

By Frank Landis, Conservation Chair

Yes, this is not the kind of remark that an ex-Angeleno like me should be making in this part of the world, even if it is intended as a lame pun, as here. I'm writing this as the Lilac Fire burns in the San Luis Rey watershed, which is an event you probably didn't want to remember, but this isn't another column about fire safety.

Here's the issue: if you believe what I promote for CNPSSD, the solution to many of San Diego's woes, including losing homes to fire, is that we're all supposed to put solar panels on our roofs, use public transit, and ride bikes everywhere but on our wildlands, because mountain bikes are tearing up ecological reserves. Most importantly, we are to stop building single family homes in high-fire areas; instead we are to build apartments, condominiums, and town-homes near transit lines. In other words, we're supposed to grow up, not out, hence the lame pun in the title.

Sounds wonderful, right? I'm sure everybody with a native garden wants to replace it with a multistory granny flat, as well as subdividing their multistory homes into apartments, as well as lobby hard for bike lanes and bus stops in their neighborhood. Doesn't that sound great to you?

Standard Story #1

By Frank Landis, Conservation Chair

The Cal Fire Vegetation Treatment Program PEIR (version 4) is out. Comments are due in January, and you are more than welcome to help. I'll be aggregating the comments for our chapter, so if you have any, send them to conservation@cnpssd.org. Since we have had issues with this, I should note that I follow CNPS state policies when I represent CNPSSD, so if you want to publish a comment that contradicts these policies, I'm not going to include it. You can submit such comments under your own name.

Here though, I'm going to talk about the aftermath of the Wine County fires, and the stories blaming chaparral for the fire's impacts. The prime example was High Country News publishing "Shrub-choked wildlands played a role in California fires" on October 24, 2017. This was particularly awkward, as there wasn't that much chaparral in the area of the Tubbs fire, and a variety of other vegetation burned too, especially close to homes.

A Look at Recent Additions to the CNPS Inventory

By Fred Roberts, Rare Plant Botanist

People join CNPS for many different reasons. Some members are there for the field trips, others for gardening advice, some are to learn more about California’s diverse flora. Others are there for rare plant science or conservation. If like me, you are in this last set, you probably know all about the online CNPS Inventory of Rare and Endangered Plants of California (Inventory). The Inventory is the official widely recognized list of sensitive California plants along with some information on ecology and general information on distribution.

If you are an expert on San Diego plants, and have been in the game for a while, you will remember when the experts would meet on rare occasions in advance of a new printed edition of the Inventory. The room would be abuzz with rare plant gossip. These were the heady days when you almost couldn’t look anywhere without realizing some species worthy of conservation status had totally been overlooked.

Today, of course, the printed Inventory is a thing of the past and we have an online version. I do miss those rooms full of lively botanists exchanging data. However, there are advantages to the new system. A widerrange of botanists can participate. Updates can be done frequently, many times a year vs. once a decade. You can check out the Inventory right now from the comfort of your phone/iPad/computer. Just type www.cnps.org/cnps/rareplants/inventory into your browser. You can catch the latest news, read up on the history of the Inventory, the status review process, and the ranking system. And of course, you can search the online Inventory for your favorite rare plant.

The Native Landscape Renovated at Cabrillo National Monument Visitor Center

The Native Landscape Renovated at Cabrillo National Monument Visitor Center

By Kay Stewart

The landscape that welcome visitors to Cabrillo National Monument Visitor Center has a beautiful new look. A great team has implemented a landscape plan developed as a collaborative effort to renovate the site. Together, they removed thirty years of non-native and weedy shrubs, and replanted plant species native to Point Loma. 

Vegetation Communities and Climate Change

Vegetation Communities and Climate Change

By Frank Landis, Chairperson, Conservation Committee

Probably I should be writing an article about the virtues of planting large numbers of plants from the plant sale—which you should—but at the Chapter Council last Saturday, Greg Suba handed me a copy of “A Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment of California's Terrestrial Vegetation,” a document written in 2016 by James Thorne et al. of UC Davis for CDFW.  And, unfortunately for you, I've been reading this, rather than thinking about how to persuade you that gardens are one way for plants to migrate to avoid climate change. So, my apologies, you're going to get a semi-review of a document you're likely to never read. But it will be interesting nonetheless. I hope.

EarthLab Demo Gardens Thriving Thanks to CNPS-SD Mini-Grant

By Kay Stewart, Mini Grant coordinator with EarthLab Demo Gardens

The Groundwork EarthLab Education and Climate Action Center is a 4-acre site adjacent to Millennial Tech Middle School, at the junction of Euclid Ave and Highway 94. EarthLab is the creation of GroundWorks San Diego, a not-for-profit organization founded to teach San Diego children and their families how we can all enhance the earth’s ability to nurture life. CNPS-SD member Bruce Hanson helped found the organization in 2010.

EarthLab is divided into realms of the benign human/nature interfaces. A half-acre is growing organic crops. Another half-acre is a nursery for native plants used for canyon restoration projects. A small creek is cared for as a linkage for wildlife living in the Chollas Creek watershed. UCSD students have aquaculture and solar energy outdoor teaching labs in another area. And a quarter- acre has ornamental gardens with low-water plants. As this neighborhood is modified the Demo Gardens will be open to a walking route connecting North and South Encanto/Webster neighborhoods. Its mission is to become a beautiful site for teaching people how to have their own backyard native plant habitats and fruit trees for their own tables.

Mid-spring this year, grants from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a $500 CNPS San Diego mini-grant awarded in 2016 bought native and drought-tolerant non-native plants. Volunteers from the US Navy, Coast Guard, and the community, and fifth-graders from local schools, planted a large portion of four gardens plans that were designed by CNPS-SD chapter members Scott Jones, David Clarke, Connie Beck, and Kay Stewart.

This month, October, the organizers will host a second planting party to infill areas that were left unplanted last spring. The organizers were granted a second $500 mini-grant by CNPS-SD to buy the native plants. On Saturday, October 28, 2017, 8:30 to noon, come join other volunteers to give these plants a great start in the EarthLab.

To learn more about this project, to volunteer, and to make donations or otherwise participate to support its work, see: http://groundworksandiego.org/. 

Jamul Mountains-June 2015

Jamul Mountains-June 2015

By Tom Oberbauer, Vice President CNPS-San Diego

The Jamul Mountains are not as well recognized as some of their nearby neighbors. They are over-shadowed by Otay Mountain at 3,500 feet and San Miguel Mountain at 2,567 feet since they top out at 2,059 feet at the highest point. The Jamul Mountain stand between SR-94 as it passes through the southern part of Jamul, and Proctor Valley.  Proctor Valley is notorious for the strange events that are purported to have occurred there: Proctor Valley monster and two headed cows; remnants of rumors from my youth growing up in the vicinity. Like San Miguel and Otay Mountains, the Jamul Mountains are composed of metavolcanic rock. This is volcanic rock that was deposited as part of a group of very tall mountains like the Andes, but in an island arc off the west coast of North America 106-108 million years ago (Kimbrough, 2014). Since I last climbed the Jamul Mountains in the late 1970’s, many things have changed including the fact that a large part of the surrounding land has been preserved, a steel barrier has been constructed to prevent OHV and trucks from driving cross-country over the slopes, and major fires have occurred. 

I set out on an overcast morning, overcast where I live, but clear and sunny by the time I reached Proctor Valley.  The temperature of the day was predicted to be in the mid 90’s. I drove down Proctor Valley Road and could see that some things have not changed, especially the washboard surface and the debris from target shooting along the side of the road. I parked my vehicle near a lone Eucalyptus tree and set off toward the peak.