Galls at Stulsaft Park, Redwood City, CA

I don't think I'd ever walked around Stulsaft Park, a decent-sized city park on both sides of the Arroyo Ojo de Agua creek in suburban Redwood City. It has several varieties of oaks growing together along the steep slopes. This time of year, oaks come with galls in various shapes, colors, and textures. Wonderful life!

I am Groot

Springtime in Foothills Park

While the rest of the country shivers and digs out, we are enjoying what amounts to early spring in the Bay Area: The magnolias and pear trees are in bloom, if you like that kind of thing (I do!), and up in the foothills the earliest bloomers are out, including the uncommon western leatherwood, Henderson's shooting stars, warrior's plume, and milk maids (easy to take for granted). The buckeye leaves have sprung too– flowers to follow soon. Ferns in abundance, greening up as best they can in this year's dry wet season.

East Bay native plant nurseries

I was in the market for a Quercus kelloggii (California black oak) to replace a walnut we had to take down, and discovered it in the inventories of two native plant nurseries I had not visited before: Oaktown Native Plant Nursery, in Berkeley, and East Bay Wilds, in the Fruitvale district of Oakland. Both are excellent native plant nurseries, each with a solid selection of some of the standards, plus some unusual plants you don't find very often, and friendly and knowledgeable staff. At Oaktown I picked up a few things, including several small pots of Tellima grandiflora, a plant I love to find growing trailside– we'll see if it can take my suburban conditions and neglect. Oaktown's oaks were not what I was looking for, so I headed to Oakland! East Bay Wilds had several very nice specimens of black oak, and the one that called out to me was raised from a Castro Valley acorn. The person who helped me seemed a little reluctant to part with that lovely little tree. $25 for a healthy tree in a 5-gallon pot... the price is right. Cash or check only at East Bay Wilds, but the corner store nearby has an ATM.

Go native!

October on the Hamm's Gulch Trail

Windy Hill OSP. Despite the incredibly dry time of year, the buckeyes are covered in lush moss, thanks to the old Douglas-firs, which harvest the fog near the ridge and create their own moist microclimate. Lovely.

Bye bye "yuta-yippus"

That's how my son Aidan pronounced "eucalyptus" when he was very little. It has its place– in Australia!– but in the Bay Area it is an unwelcome invasive monoculture. Over the years, every time I hiked up the hill in lovely Wunderlich County Park and passed by the thick grove of these untidy trees, I would say to myself, I wish somebody would cut those damn things down... and lo, somebody did! May they in due time be replaced with the live oak, black oak, tanoak, madrone, and creekbed-dwelling redwood and bay laurel that populate these biodiverse foothills.

Our buckeye

Right now our California buckeye is covered in fragrant blossoms, each a confusion of stamens. But the bees don't seem confused– just a little dazed at the abundance. This part of the show will all be over within days, when the flowers will be replaced by swelling, pendulant nuts that pull down the slender branches and contribute to the tree's spreading, horizontal architecture. A beautiful plant for all seasons.

California state animals and plants: proposed updates

California is a great state, and the California poppy is one of the best things about it. Keep the poppy.

I nominate the dark-eyed junco for new state bird. It is found everywhere you go– city, suburbs, farmland, chaparral, forests– and is even more ubiquitous than the admittedly appealing California quail, the current office holder. If it weren't so damn common, we'd find the junco more lovely and charming. Now it is true that our subspecies of dark-eyed junco used to be called the Oregon junco, which may be off-putting to some chauvinistic Californians. But Oregon's state bird is the western meadowlark; I see no big problem here. We'd also be the first state to have a variety of sparrow as state bird.

The current state reptile is the desert tortoise. I've never seen one outside a zoo, and frankly, there's a better option here: the western fence lizard. Not only are they everywhere, brightening your day as they scurry off the trail or fencepost right in front of you, but they offer all of us protection against Lyme disease by killing the bacteria when ticks feed on their blood. Well, it's a nice story anyway, even if it ain't necessarily so. The Pacific rattlesnake would be an excellent alternative.

The incumbent state tree is the coast redwood. I like the redwood just fine, but overall it is not a particularly beautiful tree, selected presumably for its age and stature. Its cousin, the giant sequoia, is a much more charismatic tree, but its range is very restricted and it may not survive climate change.

My nomination is the valley oak, a glorious tree: the largest North American oak, it is endemic to California and widespread in the central valley. Leave it to Wikipedia to offer us a poetic description: "The branches have an irregular, spreading and arching appearance that produce a profound leafless silhouette in the clear winter sky. During Autumn leaves turn a yellow to light orange color but become brown during mid to late fall. In advancing age the branches assume a drooping characteristic. Its pewter-colored rippled bark adds to the attractive aesthetic of this species." Exactly so.

The state mammal, the grizzly bear, is extinct in California, which makes it a sad joke, and, Cal Bears notwithstanding, it ought to be replaced. The black bear would be a good choice, or of course the mule deer, tule elk, coyote, or mountain lion. These are all excellent, charismatic critters, but a little unoriginal. I would go with the dusky-footed woodrat, an industrious if retiring animal, and super-cute.

Killer Trees

Get me out, cut me down...
Yikes!

After the rain

A dry winter in NorCal so far, but we got a splash the last day or two. Foothills Park is vibrant and starting to spring...

Two varieties of Hericium, on nearby logs... H. erinaceus...

... and H. coralloides...

Moss, yerba buena, and miner's lettuce among downed bay laurels...

Moss (Dendroalsia?) likes the weather...

Lichens are likin' it too...

Silk tassel (Garrya elliptica), peak bloom... up close the flower looks like a chain of lacy bells...

Bay laurel doing what it does best...

Something yellow and slimy...




And some wee club-like fungi, sharing space with some wee ripe puffballs...

Pygmy forests of Mendocino

Along the Mendocino coast one finds examples of so-called ecological staircases: terraced land structures that originated under the ocean along the California shore but have been uplifted and exposed over the past few hundred thousand years. Some of these terraces have developed poor drainage and soil types that are highly inhospitable to most plants, leading to unusual pygmy or elfin forests:

Drainage is poor at best on these stairs and plants sit in a bath of their own tannins and acids for much of the wet season. Plant communities on this terrace have reacted to limited root mobility and acidic soil by evolving stunted forms. 

There are a couple of nice examples of pygmy forests near the town of Mendocino. For a great introduction to the landscape that gives rise to these things, the Ecological Staircase Trail in Jug Handle State Natural Reserve is a must. This beautiful trail starts on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, crosses Highway 1, and descends into the lush riparian habitat of the Jughandle Creek bed. From there one ascends a series of the ecological staircases through beautiful coniferous forests, finally arriving at the pygmy forest, where a short boardwalk takes you through the thicket of stunted trees and shrubs. (Another, short stroll through a pygmy forest can be found at the Van Damme State Park. The forest is easily accessible from Airport Road.)

Some of the trees in these "forests" might be only an inch in diameter and little taller than head height, yet a century old. Bizarre and remarkable places, they were for me strangely reminiscent of the Alakai Swamp on Kauai, as well as some scrubby areas of central Florida, both otherworldly plantscapes.

Pygmy forests do not lend themselves to photography: Context is everything. But here are a few shots, including an example of the beautiful Fort Bragg Manzanita (Arctostaphylos nummularia) and the reindeer lichen (Cladonia portentosa ssp. pacifica) one finds growing on the ground under the scrub.

Feeling, fast and slow

The subtitle of Peter Wohleben's The Hidden Life of Trees is What They Feel, How They Communicate. I don't think he really can know what they feel. Certainly they react to stimuli, and in ways a lot more complex than one might have thought. Still, if sending out a chemical "distress" signal when an insect starts chewing your leaves counts as the experience of pain– well, then I imagine every living thing shares in similar feelings. I'm not sure that would pass Peter Singer's test of sentience as the ability to experience suffering.

Which is not to say Wohleben is necessarily wrong about tree feelings. He has spent a lifetime with trees, and he shares some wisdom about them in his book. For me there are two key takeaways. First, trees are social organisms. Not just in the sense that they live in groups and offer obvious mutual support as windbreaks and soil stabilizers. They also communicate, through commingling of roots and chemical signals sent across dense networks of fungal filaments– the "wood-wide web." And they share resources, in what any economist would see as risk-pooling arrangements. Of course, they are also in competition– Wohleben is especially good in describing the struggle between species in the process of forest succession, where scrappy, fast-growing pioneer varieties pounce on openings created by fire, flood, or avalanche, but inevitably are overshadowed by their more patient rivals.

Second, trees experience the world in a completely different time scale, which comes from the fact of being rooted, and the extraordinary lifespans of many species. The realization of the transitory nature of a human life compared with trees is one of the things that makes it so humbling to stand in a grove of old-growth redwoods. Fantasy filmmakers like to scare you with the trees that "come to life": think Oz, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. Real trees are actually quite active and mobile in their fashion– they just take their time about it. Mobility, in fact, occurs only on an intergenerational time scale.

The alien slowness of tree experience raises difficulties for thinking about tree sentience. I never really believed all that woo-woo business about plants having feelings, singing to your houseplants to make them happy, etc. As someone who loves forests and trees, I value trees deeply for what I understand them to be: beautiful, fascinating, and utilitarian organisms. In the past I would have welcomed Wohleben's approach only as a useful metaphor– a plea for treating trees with respect, but not to be taken literally.

Nowadays, I'm less confident in my skepticism. We take seriously that humans are animals, all the way deep down, that other animals can have cognition and consciousness, and that the bright lines dividing organisms one from another are a lot blurrier than we thought: 90% of our cells, after all, are "non-human." So who is to say that there is not some very slow-moving form of consciousness embodied in the complex network of roots, filaments, and soil microorganisms of the forest? Perhaps a consciousness that can suffer?

Wohleben is not a great writer, and his book begins to plod within the first hundred pages. But I'd recommend the first half, at least. I'm not yet sure how it will change the way I interact with trees, but I think it will.

Palo Alto in winter

By February it will be spring. At New Year's, the first rainstorms have brought mushrooms and greened up the hills. But dormancy remains the dominant theme. That, and slanting light on pied textures.

Madrone

Arbutus menziesii may well be our most beautiful native California tree, and it is certainly the most welcome this time of year. Here it is the dead of autumn, the entire color palette of the coastal hills muted tans and grays, and you come across a madrone covered in candy-colored fruit... not to mention the still-vibrant green of its rubber-plant leaves and the almost rosy tone of its smooth, cool trunk.

The Oak Project

This little fellow is a brand-new baby valley oak, Quercus lobata, which I started from an acorn. The valley oak is the largest North American oak, and in my opinion overall the most beautiful, with its vertically striated bark, broad twisting and gnarled branch architecture, and pleasingly rounded lobed leaves. Unlike our other mighty California oak, the live oak, lobata is deciduous, and every spring even the most massive giant is covered in the glowing new greenery of this photo. This particular acorn spent several months mulling it over before deciding to hoist its shoot and make a go of it. My success rate with home-grown oaks is poor, but I sure like the looks of this one.

Very big trees

I played hooky Monday and Tuesday and spent a night camping at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, and did some hiking in the general vicinity. My main objective was actually to see the spring wildflowers in the foothills... in particular the Red Hills Area of Critical Environmental Concern (!), a Bureau of Land Management property near Chinese Camp, CA. More about that in the next post. Meanwhile, some highlights from Big Trees...

Calaveras Big Trees SP preserves a couple of fine stands of giant sequoia. After I arrived in the late afternoon I took the longer hike to the more pristine South Grove, home to the park's largest sequoias. I had the grove entirely to myself. Ditto for my early morning stroll through the more accessible North Grove, adjacent to the park's headquarters and visitors center. In other words: If you have some desire to experience these extraordinary places in complete solitude, go on a weekday off season. I would not characterize myself as a spiritual person, but wonderment is something I am capable of, and you get it here.

Calaveras was privately owned for a period, and the dudes who ran the operation committed some "atrocities." They felled one of the largest specimens and made the resulting log into a bar and bowling alley. When you see the stump today there is some wonderment at how much trouble they went to in the mid 1800s to cut down such a behemoth. Essentially they attacked the thing with an auger, repeatedly drilling holes until they had hollowed out a slice, and it toppled.

Another giant(ess), the Mother of the Forest, some 2500+ years old, was stripped of its bark, which killed the tree in short order. The corpse is still standing. The bark was shipped around to various exhibitions, where it was reassembled to provide onlookers some idea of the enormity of these trees. Such pillaging is unimaginable to us now, but I have mixed feelings. Humans are collectively, for better or worse, the planet's stewards, and they can have no desire to steward what they cannot imagine or conceive. Aside from pure preservation from extinction, this is our best defense of zoos. If a traveling exhibition inspired people to value these trees and their habitat, well, perhaps the Mother died not in vain.

I have never seen a photo of a sequoia that does justice to the experience of the mammoth ancient thing in person, so I'll stick to the sideshow. Late afternoon and early morning brought slanting light, which illuminated the blossoming and leafing dogwoods against the dark hulks of the big trees. The bugs were out (photo 3), and with them the birds.

More leafing out in Foothills Park

Black oak, big-leaf maple, maidenhair fern...

Acorns

Every acorn is a beautiful thing, but the acorns of the valley oak (Quercus lobata) are particularly lovely, with their graceful elongated olive shape and variable coloration. Not to mention that each one has the potential to grow up to be California's most beautiful tree.

Uvas Canyon

Sorry kids, I shoulda been grading your final exams today. But the sky and running water beckoned. Uvas Canyon is a short drive from San Jose, tucked above Morgan Hill. The ranch lands and vineyards you pass through along the way are splendid any time of year, and worth the drive by themselves.

Uvas is known for its pleasant seasonal waterfalls, but the flora always attract my eye. Here's a typical view from the waterfall loop trail...

Madrone, the most beautiful tree in the world...

Serendipitous oak critter...

The sheer brute force with which a fleshy mushroom  can force its way up through the packed earth never ceases to amaze me (a russula, in this instance)...

... or, appear as if dropped by some wayward hiker...

Oysters... tempting, but too pretty (and too high up) to collect...