[ Lost in the Landscape ]

santa ysabel open space preserve

A trip to the town of Santa Ysabel in the spring is for me like step­ping into a time machine in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent ways. In the first most obvi­ous sense, this lit­tle town in the foothills of San Diego County appears to be pick­led in some ear­lier though indef­i­nite time period. A cou­ple build­ings have painted facades straight out of 1930s Walker Evans pho­tographs, while oth­ers look like straight­for­ward road­side com­mer­cial archi­tec­ture res­cued from the 1960s.

Time travel also comes to my mind when I look at the sur­round­ing coun­try­side. Plants that stopped bloom­ing a month ago in my neigh­bor­hood canyons are just com­ing online up here at 3000 feet. Some of this feels like Feb­ru­ary back home.

Still, even though it con­tains many famil­iar plants, this is a very dif­fer­ent ecosys­tem. There are dozens of plants I’d never see back down closer to sea level, and that’s what brought me to Santa Ysabel last weekend.

The town serves as gate­way to the Santa Ysabel Open Space Pre­serve, 5025 acres of foothills and active ranch lands set near the head­wa­ters of the San Diego River.

Botanist Jer­i­lyn Hir­sh­berg led the intense day of botaniz­ing which began with the hand­ing out of sheets of paper list­ing 203 plants that we stood a good chance of see­ing that day.

Be pre­pared. If you go an an out­ing look­ing at all the plant species in an area, expect to spend a cer­tain amount of time hud­dled together and bent over as you look at some of the small­est of the small plants. Peo­ple typ­i­cally call them “belly flow­ers.” But Jeri used a word that I’d never heard before (and I think was one she’d made up): “dinkophytes”–with “dinko” as in “dinky plants.”

A biol­o­gist on the trip com­plained sev­eral times, “That’s not a real word!” But I loved it so much that I hereby grant it offi­cial word sta­tus and encour­age all of you to begin using it.

In the end we didn’t see all 203 plants on the list, but the group found some bonuses that weren’t on it. Here are just a few of them, a cou­ple of which have made it into the gar­den world.

Johnny jump up, or Cal­i­for­nia golden vio­let (Viola pedun­cu­lata). Perky name, perky plant.

Grape soda lupine (Lupi­nus excu­bi­tus ssp. aus­tromon­tanus). Yes, it does have a distinct—but delicate—concord grape fra­grance, though it’s almost insult­ing to call the scent ”grape soda.” (Would you describe a flower by say­ing that it smells like arti­fi­cially rose-scented air fresh­ener?) The shrub is a pleas­ant mound of sil­very leaves, but the tow­er­ing spikes make it truly gor­geous this time of year.

Cal­i­for­nia milk­weed (Ascle­pias cal­i­for­nica). The clus­ters of vivid wine blooms are strik­ing. What makes this milk­weed really remark­able is that it’s cov­ered with so many soft hairs that it’s hard not to touch it. Kay, the trip orga­nizer, thought it was like han­dling a cloud. Good description.

This plant hosts the local pop­u­la­tion of the monarch but­ter­fly. Before you go off and plant this milk­weed in hopes of attract­ing them to your gar­den, how­ever, it’s worth read­ing some advice from the Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery site: “The alka­loids asso­ci­ated with this milk­weed and other milk­weeds give the but­ter­flies that feed on it pro­tec­tion. Alka­loids from the wrong milk­weed (South Amer­i­can, Mex­i­can, etc.) can expose the but­ter­flies to pre­da­tion. If the monarch or other but­ter­fly has not evolved with the milk­weed they may have lim­ited tol­er­ance for the par­tic­u­lar alka­loid of the plant species. The Cal­i­for­nia fly­way runs from Baja to Canada, it does not include Mex­ico proper nor Cen­tral Amer­ica. If you live in Chicago [which is part of the path­way of the mon­archs that migrate to main­land Mex­ico] you can plant Mex­i­can species (Ascle­pias mex­i­cana) or Ascle­pias tuberosa, don’t plant our species.”

Scar­let bugler (Pen­ste­mon cen­tran­thi­folius).

One of the botan­i­cal high­lights cen­tered on this lit­tle plant, the hill star (Lithophragma het­ero­phylla), closely related to our very pro­lific wood­land star. Though fairly com­mon to the north, this stand of hill stars formed the only cur­rently known pop­u­la­tion in San Diego County.

The idea of a county is entirely a human con­struct, but still I thought that was a pretty cool way to end the trip, see­ing the only loca­tion of a plant in my local human construct.

To end this post, here are just a few more pic­tures of the hill­sides of the pre­serve, stud­ded with at least five dif­fer­ent species and nat­ural hybrids of oaks…

April 30 2009 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Asclepias californica • butterflies • California milkweed • grape soda lupine • hill star • johnny jump up • Lithophragma heterophylla • Lupinus excubitus ssp. austromontanus • San Diego County • Santa Ysabel • Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve • scarlet bugler • Viola pedunculata | 5 Comments »