good book, cool trivia

I love a good book that sur­prises you.

When I was talk­ing to a botanist a cou­ple months ago and she rec­om­mended Oscar F. Clarke’s Flora of the Santa Ana River and Envi­rons : with ref­er­ences to world botany, I was expect­ing the book to be a nicely assem­bled writeup of a water­shed a cou­ple of hours to the north. book coverAs such it’d be a good writeup of species I’m using to see­ing in my area seen through the fil­ter of some­one work­ing in the Los Angeles/Orange/Riverside County region of South­ern California.

The vol­ume, which the back cover says “rep­re­sents a cul­mi­na­tion of a life­time of nat­ural his­tory study,” lives up to my expec­ta­tion of being a use­ful guide for study­ing the plants of the area. But in addi­tion it ends up being full of all sorts of inter­est­ing lit­tle details that breath life into what might oth­er­wise be an inert text­book. It’s a rich book, not a dense one.

(Edit, July 13, 2010: In addi­tion to Clarke, the book has three co-authors who should be named: Danielle Svehla, Greg Ballmer and Arlee Mon­talvo. Thanks to all of you for such a great book.)

For exam­ple, take some of the details in the writeup on our state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy. Last year I decided that I’d replace my plant­i­ngs of the typ­i­cal garden-orange strain with the lower-growing yel­low strain that you find locally. The first season’s plants ger­mi­nated and grew well. This year I was fully expect­ing the plants to return in pro­fu­sion, com­ing up both from last season’s roots and the seeds that the plants dropped. Instead, most of this year’s crop were the big orange gar­den strain. What went wrong?

Clarke’s descrip­tion of the species con­cludes with a sen­tence that helped answer my ques­tion: “Local native pop­u­la­tions pro­duce seeds that remain dor­mant until exposed to winter/spring con­di­tions in com­bi­na­tion with smoke or other unknown fac­tors, while pop­u­la­tions from cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and com­mer­cial cul­ti­vars pro­duce non-dormant seeds.” While it didn’t explain what I need to do to get these plants to nat­u­ral­ize, it at least explained that I was bat­tling against some unknown bio­log­i­cal forces. I felt bet­ter in my failure.

The illus­tra­tions in many man­u­als can be pretty poor, but that’s not the case here. All through­out the book brims with illus­tra­tions. Here are some of them from the poppy descrip­tion. You’ll find close­ups of diag­nos­tic plant fea­tures, usu­ally with the graphic of a penny for size comparison’s sake. And often you’ll see shots of entire plants. Each writeup also has a lit­tle rec­tan­gle with a graphic of a human stand­ing next to the plant being described. The idea is that the box will tell you a lot of details at a glances–stuff like size, growth habit, struc­ture of the flower, num­ber of petals, the posi­tion of the ovary, and whether the plant is an annual or lives longer. After hav­ing stared at the graph­ics for a cou­ple weeks I still find it a tad con­fus­ing, but if you’re good at decod­ing images instead of read­ing about the details, this might be just the thing for you. Another minor grouse is that type­face is almost too small for aging eyes like mine. Of course a big­ger type would prob­a­bly result in a larger, less field-friendly man­ual. But those are minor quibbles.

Back to some plant trivia: About Cal­i­for­nia sea laven­der, Limo­nium cal­i­for­nicum, shown here get­ting ready to bloom, Clarke observes that “The only native Cal­i­for­nia mem­ber of this genus, [it] occurs pri­mar­ily along the imme­di­ate coast. It is salt-tolerant (halo­phytic) and excretes salt on its broad, leath­ery leaves.” This detail is impor­tant to me as I decide which plants to tar­get with the left­over water I’ve gath­ered from show­er­ing. Instead of toss­ing the soapy, shampoo-spiked water, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure which plants wouldn’t mind stand­ing in the second-hand liq­uids. This species seemed happy enough with the water last year, and the writeup gives me extra con­fi­dence that I’m prob­a­bly not doing it any harm.

Life in the Santa Ana River Basin these days is as much about inva­sive plants as it is native species. Accord­ingly the book has a num­ber of exotics mixed into the 900 species it describes.

Telling grasses apart can be one of the more dif­fi­cult things to do in the field. The detailed descrip­tions and pho­tos help ease that chore. Here are the illus­tra­tions for panic veld­grass, Ehrharta erecta, a really both­er­some weed in many gar­dens, mine included.

The weed descrip­tions, like those for the other plants, have lit­tle trivia bits woven through them. About panic veldt­grass you learn that “Live­stock find it highly palat­able, espe­cially chick­ens and rab­bits.” That sen­tence might not mean a lot to you, but it explained some­thing I’ve been noticing.

Scooter, the cat, always shows a lot of inter­est when I’m in the gar­den, and is most help­ful when I’m in the mid­dle of pulling up weeds. And of all the weeds, this is the one that the cat really goes crazy over, often nudg­ing, claw­ing, fight­ing you to get to munch on a few blades of the stuff.

Ah, yes, it all sud­denly makes sense now: “live­stock,” “highly palat­able.” Eureka! So to Clarke’s list of chick­ens and rab­bits we can add another species: cats.

So yes, this is a book with lots of infor­ma­tion about plants of the Santa Ana region. But it ended up telling me as much about what’s going on in my gar­den. Very cool.

June 22 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: • • • • • • • • • • | 5 Comments »