THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS CONCERNS
SPEAKER: Fred Roberts, CNPS-San Diego Rare Plant Botanist and author of the now out-of-print but once popular guide, The Illustrated Guide to the Oaks of the Southern Californian Floristic Province.
Oaks are an important element of the California landscape. As group, they are one of the most widely recognized plants in southern California. However, with the exception of a few readily recognizable trees, determining individual species can be a challenge. Many are similar in appearance. Within certain groups they are fairly promiscuous, producing many intermediate hybrids blurring the distinctions between otherwise easily recognized species. San Diego County boasts one of the highest diversity of oaks California with ten known species ranging in form from the intricately and tangled branched Nuttall’s Scrub Oak, a coastal oak that hid in plain sight of botanists for over a hundred years, to California Black Oak, a mountain species with large, bristle-tipped leaves that turn yellow and fall to the ground in the fall. We also boast one of the state’s most problematic entities, Parry’s Oak (Quercus X acutidens), which has been considered anywhere from a variation of California Scrub Oak (Q. berberidifolia) to a full species worth recognition. Our speaker will introduce us to these oaks and others as we tour of our San Diego species, learning something of their ecology and how to tell them apart.
With over 40-years of botanical experience, Fred has worked as an assistant curator at an herbarium (UC, Irvine), a botanist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and volunteered as a conservationist. Most of those years focusing he has focused on the floristic diversity of Orange County but occasionally has picked up other interests such as understanding oaks, lilies and their relatives, and knows a thing or two about rare plants in southern California. He is currently a consulting botanist focusing on rare plant surveys, serves as rare plant botanist on several CNPS chapters, and has several book projects in the wings. In his spare time, he paints and creates botanically-themed T shirts.
6:30-7:00pm: FIRST PRESENTATION: TBD
7:00pm-7:30pm: A time for discussion, camaraderie, visiting, and enjoying the sales table.
7:30pm: FEATURED PRESENTATION
There are no fees to attend these presentations.