On Sunday we were working outside on a project and happened to look up at the sky. A plane had been skywriting, spreading some advertising copy in the sky to the north—some sort of ad for Geico insurance, I think. After that text was done, up popped this message:
Here’s the same picture turned upside down if you’re not one of those people who read books inverted:
“Be fire safe?”
Here in San Diego we often don’t obsess about fire until after the end of summer, when the land around us has gone without water for six months and the hot desert winds blow from the east. The end of October is classic fire season for us, the time of year when the firestorms of 2003 and 2007 ravaged this part of the state. But last month’s Santa Barbara fire and this little bit of public-service skywriting got me thinking about the place of fire in the local ecosystem.
Three meetings ago, the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society hosted wildfire ecologist Richard Halsey. Director of the California Chaparral Institute, Halsey has been working to try educate the public about new understandings about fire. In addition to the institute, he’s been a strong voice in the media, and has authored the book, Fire, Chaparral and Survival in Southern California. (Town Mouse & Country Mouse did a nice post on Fire this month, which included some good quotes from Halsey.)
Anyone who thinks that plant society meetings are slow, drawn out affairs wasn’t at the meeting I attended. Halsey and one of the other biologists invited to speak went mano a mano over some of the ideas that represented a break from what is still being taught in schools.
I’m no biologist, but at least some of Halsey’s points made sense to me. Here’s a short list of some of what he had to say:
- The notion that “chaparral needs to burn” is a crock of bat guano. Although the ecosystem is adapted to coming back after a blaze, it doesn’t need fire to thrive.
- When areas burn more frequently than the plants living there are adapted to, however, many original plant species die out and invasives begin to move in. Type conversion of chaparral into a weedy grassland of exotic species can begin.
- Extensive fire breaks gouged into a natural area are a magnet for weed species that can take over the ecosystem. (See the previous bullet point.) Of all of these points, the other biologist made the strongest argument against this position of Halsey’s, citing a study where areas with abandoned fire breaks revert almost completely to their previous species after a certain number of years.
- A new study looking at ocean sediments in the Channel Islands shows that large fires have occurred in Southern California, but were separated by far greater numbers of years than we’re seeing today. Virtually all the fires we’re seeing today have been caused by humans.
- A legend of the local Kumeyaay people mentions a particularly devastating fire several hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish in California and Mexico. After the fire, the Kumeyaay had to live in the desert for an entire generation before the land west of the mountains was habitable again.
As recently as 2003-2004, when I was working a photography series on the 2003 Cedar Fire, I put together an artist’s statement for that body of work that included the sentence, “The land needed to burn, to regenerate.” Halsey has convinced me that it’s time for me to rethink that position.
James SOE NYUN. Hill with Wildflowers, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004. Chromogenic print, 15 x 18 3/4 in.
May 26 2009 | Categories: landscape | Tags: fire • fire ecology | 3 Comments »
Here’s an update on conditions, taken from the complete press release by the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden:
Fire officials accompanied Botanic Garden President Dr. Edward Schneider through the Garden, allowing him to assess the buildings and grounds. “The good news is that the Meadow, Discovery Garden, Teahouse, Desert and most of the Redwood Exhibits are untouched,” said Dr. Schneider. “Unfortunately, the historic Campbell Bridge, the beloved Pritchett Path, the popular Redwood Tree Ring Exhibit, Oak Woodland and Porter Path Exhibits were either destroyed or heavily damaged.” Further damage was also sustained in the riparian corridor canyon as the fire spread from Tunnel Road down to Mission Creek.
…Yesterday, the Garden confirmed loss of structures on its grounds. The 1908 Gane House, the proposed centerpiece of the Botanic Garden’s building project, the Vital Mission Plan, was destroyed. The Botanic Garden had hoped to rehabilitate the large Craftsman-style home and to seek historic landmark status for it. Also lost in the fire was a deck overlooking Mission Canyon Creek, a lathe house, and the Director’s residence and garage.
Original post:
I’ve been distressed to read over the last couple days that at least part of Santa Barbara Botanic Gardens has burned in the Jesusita Fire that’s tearing through the community. Has anyone heard anything more detailed?
This morning’s Los Angeles Times described how the garden’s Gane House has burned:
In Mission Canyon, the century-old Gane House at the 78-acre Santa Barbara Botanic Garden was engulfed in flames, leaving little more than three brick chimneys standing.
“We’re very heartbroken,” said Nancy Johnson, the garden’s vice president of marketing and government relations. “We were hoping to restore it to its grandeur.”
Lost inside were all the gardening tools, horticultural materials, the metal shop that made tags to identify plants, the overstock of books published by the garden, and the office contents and computers of the head gardener and facilities maintenance man, Johnson said. Biofuel gardening truck parked outside also appear to have been destroyed.
And yesterday’s Silicon Valley Mercury News ran a news wire story that mentioned:
[Carol] Ostroff said she evacuated Tuesday and stayed with friends nearby until they too had to evacuate on Wednesday.
“The wind kicked up, and we watched this firestorm on the hill,” Ostroff said.
Ostroff, who along with her husband acts as caretaker for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, sells tinctures and herbal wreaths from her home garden at the local farmer’s market.
“My garden is my life,” she said. “If I lose my garden I’m out of a job. My husband’s out of a job too.”
The SBBG has been an important force in Southern California native plant horticulture, having introduced many interesting additions that are a part of many gardens. My garden alone has Salvia leucophylla ‘Amethyst Bluff,’ Galvezia juncea ‘Gran Canon,’ and Artemisia californica ‘Canyon Gray.’ I hate to see such a resource turned to ashes.
May 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: fire • Santa Barbara Botanic Garden | 3 Comments »
It’s spring, all right. The garden continues to bloom away manically, but the outdoor places around town have been no slouch, either, when it comes to flowers.
This Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gardens, features a gallery of some blooms from the garden mixed in with blooms from Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.
In the top photo from Mission Trails you can see that the yellow-flowered deerweed, Lotus scoparius, has colonized many of the sunny areas that burned four and a half years ago. As the landscape recovers, other plants will come in and stake their claims. The second image from near the top of Fortuna Peak shows that other areas are also recovering from the fires, though slower than farther downslope.
You can hover over each image below for its name, or click it to see a larger photo. While you can probably tell what’s a wild plant and what’s in the garden, there’s an answer key at the end if you’re into quizzing yourself. (A few of thee are tricky in that they’re local native plants that have been incorporated into the garden.)
Answers:
Wild, garden, garden;
garden, wild, wild;
wild, garden wild;
garden, garden, garden;
garden, wild, garden;
wild, garden, wild;
wild, wild, wild.
April 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: Add new tag • fire • fire ecology • flowers • gbbd • in bloom • Mission Trails Regional Park | 5 Comments »
It seems a lot of my recent posts have had something to do with fire. Living in Southern California during the fall, fire is a constant worry at the edges of the city. This year saw some bad examples, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that the worst is over.
When I visited Yellowstone last spring, reminders of the massive 1988 fires were everywhere, with fire-downed trees still to be seen throughout the park. But there were also signs of recovery every place you looked. Some places the fire looked like a distant memory, other places it looked like only last month, a reminder that in a land dominated by cold and snow much of the year, recovery can come slowly.
I took a lot of tourist pictures that trip. I also turned the camera on some of the acres in the park where the burns were still a strong presence. Four of the images will be part of the upcoming 2009 Juried Biennial Exhibition at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery in Carlsbad, in North-County San Diego. The jurors of this year’s show, Stephen Hepworth, Curator of the University Art Gallery at UCSD, and Sue Greenwood, Director of Greenwood Fine Art in Laguna Beach, selected forty-eight works by twenty-seven artists.
The public opening is December 13, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and the show runs through February7 of next year. It’s a city-run space and is attached to the public library. Admission is free. Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood!
Burned Slope #2, Yellowstone National Park (Yellowstone Burnscap
Here are a couple of the images that will be in the show. The first, “Burned Slope II,” features a site in the north of the park where recovery seemed just about the slowest.
A photograph can describe things clearly. You can see the slow decay of the wood, along with subtle signs of regeneration.
But I’m also interested in a photograph that can reach for things that aren’t at all about quantifying the world. I like how the slope here gives you a sense of simultaneously looking down on the scene as well as out across it, making the space—and maybe even time—seem ambiguous, like a puzzle needing to be worked out slowly.
Hoop on Burned Tree, Yellowstone National Park (Yellowstone Burn
The second, “Hoop on Burned Tree,” was shot behind the employee housing near Tower Falls. The scene made me laugh. When life give you fire and burned trees, well, why not take advantage of a difficult situation and make yourself a basketball court next to a scorched pine?
December 04 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: basketball • Carlsbad • fire • William D. Cannon Art Gallery • Yellowstone National Park | 4 Comments »
Linda lives in inland San Diego, although nowhere near the extreme eastern frontiers of the county. Still, during the October 2007 wildfires, she was evacuated for several days when the flames came close to her home.
Recently a booklet showed up at her house. Entitled Will You be Prepared for the Next Wildfire?, it listed the steps you can follow to make your home more fire-resistant. Interestingly more than half of the pamphlet was dedicated to landscaping.
One of the main ideas the publication lays out is to develop “defensible space” around your house. The photo below shows the basic concept better than any words could [ source ].
The other landscaping tips deal with selecting the best plants to have near your house. Two pages of fire-resistant trees, shrubs, groundcovers, vines and perennials round out the recommendations.
Being the plant expert that I am (yeah right…) I did notice a couple of little proofreading glitches with the pamphlet. There’s a photo of something labeled “coyote bush,” but the plant is something altogether different. Also, there’s a typo in the plant lists that calls something a “bush gerimander” instead of a “bush germander.” (It seems to be a typo somehow befitting a booklet produced by a political entity: a plant that’s the linguistic hybrid of a germander and a political district drawn by gerrymander!) But those are minor quibbles.
Check out all the good information at the San Diego County’s Office of Emergency Services. It might help you save your house next fire season.
November 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: defensible space • fire • fire-resistant landscaping | No Comments »
After San Diego County’s fires of 2003 moved into new areas, I was one of those tacky disaster tourists who went into some of the recently reopened areas. It’s interesting what motivates people to do things of the sort. An acquaintance with documentary photographer aspirations scours the world for disaster, and has gone to witness famine in Africa and Asia, and was in Banda Ache in 2005 not long after the previous December’s tsunami. What can you witness in times like that?
I wasn’t looking for human suffering. Also, I had no interest in the mawkish Hallmark-card exploitation of some weird sort of notion of human dignity that emerges in desperate times. I was primarily interested in the fires as one whopping dose of reality of the power of nature, just as I have this fascination of volcanoes and earthquakes, not for the terrors they can unleash on us humans, but more for a much-needed dose of human humility. I think that we humans are blisteringly arrogant as a species and need to be rattled into consciousness about our place in the universe.
You can make some of these discoveries while gardening, observing the world and uncovering your place in it. But I guess I’m dense enough that it takes something cataclysmic to give me the rest of the story. Dunno…maybe it’s the same kind of need that drives people to mountain climbing or NASCAR…
So there I went, out into the burn areas, mostly to the backcountry, but also around my neighborhood. Looking back at the photos I took I think that I was looking to find some sort of order or beauty out of the mess. Was it looking for some sort of reassurance? Or maybe something approaching acceptance? Making peace with the realities of the world?
La Jolla Panorama with Smoke I, Day 3, 2003.
Here’s the left half of a diptych taken on the third day of the fires from the top of Mount Soledad, a viewpoint that on other days gives you a view of the ocean, downtown San Diego and the mountains to the east. This was day three of the fires, with the flames now probably no closer than ten miles away. But that day most of what you saw was the air, thick with smoke and the color of burnt caramel.
“Tim Loves Julia” Rock, near El Capitan Reservoir, Day 3, 2003.
Taken the same day as the previous image, this was out just a couple miles from where the Cedar Fire began. With the winds blowing east-to-west, the air was surprisingly clear immediately overhead but the smell of ash was everywhere. This boulder with the graffiti was probably about as close as I got to looking at that human dignity thing. I wonder if Tim and Julia are still together. Or was this just some drunken midnight outing with a sixpack and a can of spraypaint?
My first tourist pictures turned into a small photographic series, The Fire Works. Over the course of several months I visited many areas that had burned and looked for the signs of change, restoration or recovery.
Mission Trails Park II, 3 Months Later, 2004.
After three months and a few rains things were still blackened, but the green was starting to come back.
Mission Trails Park VI, 3 Months Later, 2004.
Taken the same afternoon as the previous image, the signs of recovery are a little more subtle in this picture. Immediately after the fire the rocks were black. Now they’re washed white. In a large print of this image you can see little seedlings returning to the park.
Rock and Branches, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.
The Cuyamaca Mountains experienced some of the most intense burning. But add some time, sunlight and water and you end up with one of the more spectacular spring wildflower blooms I’d seen in a few years.
Hill with Wildflowers, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.
…And this is one of the last images I took in the series, the following May. With the majority of the pines in the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park wiped out, restoration was far from complete. It may take longer than my lifetime, and things will never be exactly as they were. But nature is doing what it does and doing it beautifully.
This project was a real eye-opener for me. You can read about the transformations that occur after a fire and appreciate the facts. Still, there’s nothing like getting out into the areas that were affected to give me a much deeper appreciation of the changes.
After 2007’s fires, however, after watching too many days of disaster coverage on television, I had no inclination whatsoever to repeat my post-fire surveys of 2003 and 2004. I stayed in the house, turned on the HEPA air filter I’d bought after the earlier fires, and tried my best not to let the horrific news coverage get to me. Sometimes you feel that a human being has seen enough.
Speaking of things that humans probably shouldn’t have to ever live through, let me plug a book by one of my recent coworkers, Paul Harris, who’s recently published Diary From The Dome: Reflections on Fear and Privilege During Katrina.
Paul went as tourist to New Orleans, looking to spend a laid-back week taking in what the Southern city had to offer. Instead he ended up in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, evacuated to the Superdome along with thousands of the city’s residents who couldn’t find a way out of town. You’ve heard or read of some of what happened there, but Paul gives an especially harrowing account of the the experience. He saw and lived through things none of the press reported, including how being a white tourist gave you privileges that none of the majority black residents were offered. This book will open your eyes.
October 19 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: Cedar Fire • fire • fire ecology • Hurricane Katrina • Paul Harris | 1 Comment »
I’ve been thinking a lot about fire lately. I blogged a few days ago about starting an informal experiment to look at ways to start seeds that require fire to germinate. And lately we’ve been experiencing the sort of dangerous fire conditions that you only see in the autumn here in Southern California.
When the dry Santa Ana winds scour westward from the desert an hour to the east, they can bring to October some of the warmest days of the year. At the same time, as these dry, gale-force winds blow westward through the mountain passes, they breed dangerous conditions for major wildfires.
Monday night, as I was leaving the office, someone stopped me on the way out. “Have you heard about the fires?” he asked. The Los Angeles area had been seeing fires over the last couple of days and now Camp Pendleton, forty miles to the north, was burning. People were being evacuated from their homes.
Oh no. Here we go again, I thought. Fortunately, several days later, those fires all seem to be doused or at least on the way to containment. But the fire weather is still with us.
It was almost a year ago when John and I were up on the roof deck, having an early dinner, enjoying a freakishly warm October afternoon. Looking directly west the horizon was clear, but to both the north and south there were dark streaks of smoke. Driven by the same desert winds that had made that afternoon so remarkably warm, the smoke rose high into the atmosphere from sources farther inland and streaked out over the ocean. Things were burning, and it was looking bad.
Above: An enhanced NASA image of the San Diego County fires that first afternoon, October 22, 2007 [ source ]
One of John’s coworkers lost his home that first night of the fire. Over the next several days, hundreds of thousands of others were temporarily homeless when they were ordered to leave their homes in the largest evacuation in California history. In the final tally, a quarter of the county’s land had burned and at least people seven had lost their lives, including several migrant workers who were traveling on foot, north to their jobs. (Earlier this year producer Laura Castaneda put out a documentary, The Devil’s Breath, on some of their stories. When the history of the migrant workers is written, it’ll be full of the sort of heroic figures and trying circumstances that populate the American narrative of the settlement of the “wild west.” )
Last year’s fires had followed a set of even more destructive ones in 2003. Those came closer to my house than last year’s flames—within maybe three miles—and that first morning saw a hot rain of ash and even embers.
The photojournalists were rushing to the fire lines, trying to get a shot of the devastation. But it was the vision of the sun veiled in smoke drew out my camera that first morning. There’s a color to the light that comes with fire, a pervasive and almost sticky yellow-brown that reminds you of sunset colors even in the middle of the day, but the browning effect is so profound that everything looks wrong. If I didn’t tell you that the images were of smoke you might consider the images beautifully atmospheric. I guess they are, but there’s that scary counterbalancing of something being out of control and dangerous.
(That vibration of beauty and terror goes straight back to eighteenth-century aesthetics, and to early writings of people like Joseph Addison, who remarked that “The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.” This is rich ground that been mined by a number of artists for the last quarter-millennium. In the photography world, John Pfahl and Richard Misrach are just a couple of those who have produced significant bodies of work drawing on this conflicted Romantic notion of the sublime. And as long as people have this notion of awe and powerlessness, there will be centuries more of art drawing from it.)
[ next, after the fires… ]
October 18 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • rambles | Tags: 2003 • Cedar Fire • fire • Santa Ana winds | 3 Comments »
