Hikes at Point Reyes -- Photographic Interlude II

After our hike at Mnt Tam, we drove on to spent the night at Point Reyes Station, very close to the Point Reyes National Sea Shore. We hadn't been there for a while, and missed the brisk sea air, interesting wildlife, and exhilarating hikes.


For our first day, we'd picked the hike to Tomales Point. We started at the Historic Pierce Point Ranch, shown above with a stand of the rare Bishop Pine (Pinus muricata). In contrast to Mnt Tam, the Point Reyes area has been used for dairy cows since the time of the early settlers. Sadly, that means that the annual European grasses have completely replaced native bunch grasses. But on the flip side, these are happy cows, and the dairy farmers farm sustainably (and the cheese is delicious).

Some wildflowers remain. It was a special treat to see the Point Reyes wallflower (Erysimum concinnum), which originates here and is available through several California native nurseries.

And yet again, the views were amazing. As you can see on the map, we had the ocean on our left, and Tomales Bay on our right (walking out toward the point). There's some elevation gain, but the hike isn't truly steep. The sandy soil and fierce weather do not support trees, instead, you find Coyote brush (Baccharis piluaris) and Yellow Bush Lupine (Lupinus arboreus). I'm actually not quite sure whether this lupine is locally native here. I do know that it's amazing to hike this trail in late spring, when the lupine is blooming. Right now, it's just coming back from summer dormancy and starting to sprout grey-green leaves.

But here the views. First of the ocean.


And here Tomales Bay. Isn't it amazing? I can't believe I live just a few hours away. (Note to self: Go back in spring, take photos of lupine).

But we weren't just walking this trail for the views. And we weren't just walking this trail in anticipation of another excellent meal of local produce (Chanterelle pizza, anyone?). No, we were after something else entirely, and saw the first trace not to long after we started.


Yes, that's scat! And this particular scat, looking like triple-size rabbit droppings -- hard to photograph, who knew -- belongs to Tule Elk.


Let me quote from Point Reyes National Seashore: "The tule elk herds had virtually disappeared by 1860, 13 years before the state awarded them complete protection. In the spring of 1978, two bulls and eight cows were brought in from the San Luis Island Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos. The elk were contained within a temporary, three acre enclosure to allow for adjustment to their new surroundings. That summer, 6 of the cows bore calves. In the fall, 17 elk were released from the enclosure on Tomales Point to 2,600 acres of open grassland and coastal scrub. By the summer of 1988, the population was at 93 animals. The population census taken in 2000 counted over 400 elk."


Truth is, you don't even have to get out of your car to see the elk, there's a herd on the other side of Piece Point Ranch easy to see from the road. But we had fun doing our 9-mile walk and felt lucky that this land has not been built up and is available for all to enjoy.

The following day we got an early start and were ready for a short hike near the visitor's center. We loved the lichen. Point Reyes really is so much more moist than where we live. And all the forest groundcover plants thrive. Lots of mushrooms, grasses, undercover shubs such as snowberry, and 7-foot high huckleberry (vaccinium ovatum). Sword fern (Polystichum munitum) that was probably 4 feet high (The ones in my garden are about 1 foot, and struggling). It was almost an Alice in Wonderland effect, everything magnified, or maybe I had shrunk.



Again, beautiful views of the ocean, with conifers so pretty you want to decorate them as Christmas trees. Or maybe not.

Interestingly, while the grass at Tomales Point is already green from the recent rains and constant fog, the meadow here is still showing the golden California color. But in just a few weeks, it will be green as well.

Down in the valley, along Bear creek, everything was moist again, green, with lime green lichen, mushrooms, and thick understory. The birds serenaded us as we walked back to our car, happy about everything we'd seen, and feeling fortunate indeed that it had been a dry weekend.

"Now the rains can start," we said. "We're ready to rest for a bit, and hope to come back in the spring."

Hike at Mt. Tam -- A Photographic Interlude

Mr. Mouse and I spent last weekend away from home. We'd been ready for a break, feeling a bit worn out between work and things to do around the house and garden.

We started the weekend with a Saturday hike at Mount Tamalpaias in Marin County. Mount Tamalpaias is a state park, with many beautiful hikes. It actually took us only about 90 minutes to drive there. When we arrived at the East Peak parking lot, starting point for our hike, the views were amazing. It had rained recently in the North Bay, and the weather was cool and clear.

The most amazing thing, though, were the plants. I usually hike in areas that have been logged or grazed or otherwise used by humans. The vegetation in those areas is very much a mix of natives and exotics. The area where we hiked, however, looked as if it hadn't had much to offer for humans. It was too steep for cows and no large trees beckoned to be felled. More importantly, the soil is serpentine. Many European and other invasive plants don't do well in serpentine soil and many natives, including native grasses, do well.

Above, a very happy Manzanita (Arctostaphylos), though I'm not sure which one.

I was especially impressed by the size of some of the Manzanitas, the one above is easily 30 feet. Not a surprising size for a Madrone, but quite unusual for a Manzanita. There were also Ceanothus, Toyon (photo below), and other chapparal plants near East Peak, and our hike went through a mixed woodland with ferns, moss, and lichen.

I could have stopped every 10 minutes to take another photo, like this one of the Richmond Bridge (did I mention the views were amazing?)

But we weren't quite sure whether we were on the right path, and the gates closed at sunset. Thanks to a good guidebook and Mr. Mouse's excellent navigation skills, we made it back to the car with time to spare, ready to continue our adventure.

Where are YOU Planted, Country Mouse?

I was going to just leave a grateful comment on Town Mouse's wonderful and informative post on the topic of "Where are YOU planted" - originated by An Obsessive/Compulsive plant collector - when I realized that though we live only about 30 miles apart AND we are both in the same zones - Sunset Zone 16 and USDA Hardiness Zone 9b - yet our native plant habitats and growing conditions are quite different.

The Country Mouse and Wood Rat establishment is just a bit south-west of the square thingy that's above Scotts Valley on the map. The map includes Ms Town mouse's locale, which lies between Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. As you can see, Ms Town lives on the other side of the Coast Range from me, in one of the pleasant suburbs that spread along the flat-bottomed Santa Clara Valley.

Our home (shown in the image I cut out of Google Earth) is on a sunny ridge about 6.5 miles north of the Monterey Bay, and 900 feet above sea level, on the south-eastern flank of the Santa Cruz Mountains, which protect Santa Clara Valley from much, though not all, of the marine influence we feel much more strongly.

We get our share of fog here in winter; but we are fortunate (I think) to live in a "Coast Range Thermal Belt," which is why we are in Sunset Zone 16: hotter and drier in summer than you might expect, not quite so cold in winter. Lower, shadier locations not two miles from our home are in the more typical coastal zone, zone 17, cooler and more foggy. We can see Monterey Bay when it's clear. Sometimes white fog fills its basin like whipped cream, and creeps up the valleys to engulf us, and sometimes we are totally enveloped in low clouds. But generally it's sunny all summer long.

Our zones are the same, but my soil is also different from Tmouse's soil. Her soil is probably alkaline, deep and clayey. Rich but lacking in air spaces. Mine tends to be acidic, sandy, and thin where there are no trees to provide humus. California natives that like fast draining soil grow here.

Where TMouse has a large garden by suburban standards, we have a small lot by mountain standards: officially just under three acres. But it feels like an endless universe to me. I never would have guessed I would ever own such a property, not in my wildest dreams.

The Google image reveals that the "garden" areas of our property, close to the buildings, are not - ahem - very well developed as yet. I need help with design. But I also have control issues! Result: planting paralysis. More on that in another post maybe. I'm more focused on eradication of invasives, managing the fuel load, and propagation of local natives. But I would like a pretty garden one day.

In the photo you can see the chamise chaparral that lies to the south. The part across the road is on our property too - I'm not really sure where it ends. We haven't disturbed it and may not. On the house side of the road you can see where we have been thinning, taking out most of the chamise, and all the dead wood, as is recommended for fire safety. The photo shows how it looked last year. That area is almost completely thinned now.

There are also open spots now in the wooded areas on the northern facing slope, where the bay tree and eucalyptus were removed this spring. I wonder when that will show up on Google Earth. The northern slope has redwood and mixed-evergreen forest habitats with beautiful toyon, madrone, Douglas fir, and, of course, redwoods.

Las Pilitas has us wrong, in terms of their Communities by Zipcode feature. They say we should have Mixed Evergreen Forest, which we do, and Coastal Sage Scrub, which we we don't. We have Chamise Chaparral. Artemisia californica, California Sagebrush, grows nearby, but not on our property or the areas adjacent. Mother nature is messier than the botanist's neat schemes. Some plants common to both sage scrub and chaparral grow here, like monkey flower, and manzanita, but it's too hot and dry here in summer, I think, for the sage scrub habitat to take hold. Las Pilitas doesn't mention the redwoods either, that cover much of the shady slopes.

But I don't exectly know the history of this spot yet. At some point before this land was divided up into lots for wilderness homes, it was a "ranch." The old name still hangs from a disused farm gate at the end of our road. I would love to know what the rancher did up here, how much of the land was left in its original state, and how much was cleared - probably for orchards or grazing for animals - and then returned to the wild later, or turned into vineyards, a common use for land around here. Maybe there was sage scrub here, and it got converted to chamise chaparral through human intervention? I'd love to find out.

I'm thinking about history lately because I've been dipping into the books I splurged on, in a recent University of California Press sale. (I went there for Jepson, of which more anon, and ended up buying many more books!)

One of my purchases was A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, the memoir of Mary Hallock Foote. She was a published writer and illustrator, an Easterner who came west with her engineer husband in the late 1870s. But even though she lived in the "far west" for most of her adult life, she never did feel at home here.

Curious, I read her short story, "In Exile," because it is set near here, and is based on her experiences living in the community that sprang up around the New Almaden Quicksilver Mine, just south of San Jose. (It's now the Almaden Quicksilver County Park, with a great museum and wonderful hiking.)

I was so surprised by the attitude of the characters in her story, the "exiles" filled with longing for their cultured eastern homes, and dislike of the arid California climate and landscape. Well, of course things are less rough-and-ready around here now. No lack of culture. Plus - the Internet! But it did make me realize how differently I feel.

How can I not feel that this is where I'm planted, amid this cornucopia of flora and fauna that spills out ever more abundantly about me, the more I simply look?

Where are You Planted?

Earlier this month, Secrets of a Seed Scatterer had an interesting post "Where Are You Planted." The question originated with Janie, and it immediately resonated with me.

Geographically, I'm located in Mountain View, CA "in Silicon Valley," as it says on the Wikipedia disambiguation page for the entry. Home of Google, as well, and of NASA Ames. You can read about my fair city (or my fair suburb) in various places on the Internet so I won't bore you with details.

But where am I PLANTED? For me, that means, which plants live here, which plants belong here and do well in local gardens. Let me count the ways of discovering that.

1. Sunset zones. For much of the country, how cold it gets determines the hardiness zone you're in (I think we're in Zone 9b) and that, in turn, determines which plants will grow. For much of the West, however, other determining factors are how hot it gets, and possibly how dry or how wet it gets. Because of that, we use the Sunset zones, which give a more fine-grained picture. The best map I can find is here, but a more detailed map in the Sunset Western Gardening Book shows just the SF Bay Area and seems to place us in Zone 16. It's hard to believe how many microclimates we have in the Bay Area. Most of us have driven just 30 miles to find ourselves in unexpectedly cold (or hot) conditions, with the wrong clothes.

Why do I care about my Sunset zone? Because the Western Gardening Book and many other garden resources tell me which plants will do well where I live. (The Western Gardening Book includes many native plants. Unless you're aiming for locally native plants, the information is invaluable).

2. Calflora has a What Grows Here site that allows you to see which plants are found in which part of the state. I've used the site already to figure out what that wildflower was that I found in a State Park or during other hikes. The very rich (and at times slightly confusing) interface allows me to do in-depth research on the plants that grow where I live. My search resulted in 2042 plants, 1602 of them native. I can focus on just trees, or for example, just vines (this search). Very cool, and I love the photos!

3. Las Pilitas is a native plant nursery in Southern California that has a wealth of information about native plants (some of it a bit controversial). I might go to Calflora to see what's planted here, and to Las Pilitas to see what I can plant here. When I look up Mountain View in their Plant Communities database, I find myself in Coastal Sage Scrub, which is characterized by these plants:

• California Sagebrush (Artemesia californica),
• Buckwheat (Eriogonum ssp),
• California Lilac (Ceanothus ssp),
• Manzanita (Actostaphylos ssp),
• Monkey flower,
• Gooseberry and Currant (Ribes ssp),
• Sage (Savia ssp),
• Coyote Brush (Baccharis ssp).

Thankfully, those are exactly the plants I have in my garden. Las Pillitas also lists Mixed Evergreen Forest for my zip code, and again I find several plants that I've already added to my garden.

I especially enjoy that Las Pillitas includes information about the critters that live where I'm planted, which include Towhee (yes!), White crowned sparrow, Cottontail, Deer, Coyote, Raccoon (unfortunately true), Quail, Skunk, Gopher (oh please, no!), Hummingbirds (and lots of them!).

4. Native Plant Link Exchange. Now, assume I'm really getting excited about adding some plants to my garden that belong where I am. I might just drive to one of the excellent native plant nurseries nearby (see our side bar), or go to the Native Plant Link Exchange. What I like about that site is that I can select a plant I already have, then find other plants that might be good companion plants, and then find where I can purchase those plants. For example, assume I look up Dryopteris arguta (wood fern). The site shows me 5 nurseries that carry the plant. But I can also click "What plants grow with Dryopteris arguta", and can even filter the results of that search.

To anyone who's followed along this far: Congratulations! I hope you'll enjoy a few happy hours as you plan what to put into your own garden, or you might just enjoy looking at pictures and descriptions of Where I Am Planted (if your eyes glazed over in the middle of it, I promise the next post will have pictures and fewer links).

Jeffrey Caldwell sent me the following information about an additional great resource:

A useful local source not noted in your blog is the Natural Resources DataBase, which lists plants for many local county parks, open space preserves, etc. [227 protected areas] throughout the greater San Francisco Bay region (also birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish). You can use it to generate plant lists of those preserves that are closest to the location of interest.

To generate a plant list for the preserve of interest

1. Run your cursor over "Searches" which generates a drop-down menu;
2. Choose "Checklist" search and click.
3. Then on the Checklist page,

a. check "Flora" in the species category,
b. check your preferred 'Sort By' and
c. run your cursor over "Select Preserve" for another drop down menu.

You can get to a particular preserve by name or click on County and then again on the particular preserve you wish to generate a checklist for.

This database is a wonderful tool. There are many other ways to use it, too -- it is all pretty simple, I'm no techie and have used it various different ways ...

End of the Line

Gardening Gone Wild has invited garden bloggers for the last Picture This Photo Contest of the year. The topic is "End of the Line", which can be taken literal or metaphorical. It's been fun to see what people have come up with, including our own Country Mouse with her End of the Line for the Brush Pile post.

For me, the post was a sad reminder that by mid-November, it's usually no longer possible to dry clothes outside, so it's the end of the clothesline until the days get longer and warmer.

My mother never had a dryer, and I never stopped drying clothes outside during the warmer time of year (disclaimer: usually Mr. Mouse is responsible for the laundry and does the work, but philosophical, we agree on this matter). Laundry smells much better, the energy savings are significant, and it really doesn't take that long to hang things.

We own multiple contraptions for hanging things outside. The Japanese square-with-clothespins is very convenient for socks and underwear. You just put the basket with the wet laundry somewhere elevated and pin everything, then you hang up the whole square. No bending down for each sock. Also an easy way to presort socks by color.

For clothesline overflow, we have a rack. We actually use the rack inside in winter for synthetics we don't want to stick in the dryer. The rack folds up small and goes into the shed or closet.


And here's where the clothes drying business intersects with garden concerns. While we love hanging things up to dry, we don't really want to see the different contraptions (or the laundry) during the rest of the week. Drying clothes on the line is newly fashionable, and some love to have a visible clothesline as garden ornamentation (I might like it if I had a larger garden, but I don't). We prefer other art.

So we put the Japanese square and the rack in the closet, and even the clothesline is retractable and hooks over two screws in the house. We lift it up, and that's the end of the line for the week.

I can't wait to look at everyone else's posts. It's always educational to see what the juror likes and what I enjoy. Though really, I enjoy so many of the posts, I'm glad I don't have to select a winner.

I'm so sorry!

Mr. Mouse: " I'm so sorry. That succulent really was a bit too close to the driveway."

Town Mouse: "Well, we're lucky that I have a ready supply of that same succulent in the back garden. They're just ready for dividing. "

Town Mouse (thinking) "And after that delicious dinner you and Mr. W.R. treated me and Ms Country Mouse to, who could be angry over such a mere trifle."

Propagation tips from another pro, and a bit of this and that

NOTE: This post was written by Country Mouse, though it has the Town Mouse byline.

First thanks again for the responses to Town Mouse's blogday retrospective - it is gratifying indeed to know that we are not burbling into the wind but that indeed we are all enjoying mutual sharing of knowledge and experience on our similar or different garden paths.

A wordy post this time - words are quicker for me to jot down than pictures are to dig up, and I don't have a lot of time today.

A propos of nothing: I recently read (in Introduction to California Chaparral by Ronald D. Quinn and Sterling C. Keeley), that bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus) are insect and spider eaters. So when I see them on the coyote brush, digging into the fluffy flowers and seeds - they must be after insects and not seeds! I'll have to go out with a loupe and see if I can see little bugs in there. I haven't gotten any good pictures of their acrobatic antics yet this year, maybe a little later on. (I'm taking this fine book on a weekend trip I'm taking to Savannah Georgia tomorrow, for a wedding. I hope to write a review if I haven't already done so when I get back.)

I learned so much at a CNPS talk I attended recently on growing California natives from seed. The speaker was Matt Teel, propagator at Yerba Buena nursery. Here are some of the amazing and enlightening things I learned:

A good tip for collecting seeds from plants that explode their seeds when they are ripe, such as lupines, is to gather flowering stalks with seed pods just before they are ripe, and put them in vases as you would flowers. Matt puts the vases into garbage cans - you need some way to capture the seeds when the pods pop.

He also explained why it is important to clean the seeds, i.e., remove all the other plant stuff that is not seed from the seed: it rots or gets pathogens. Then the seeds rot or get pathogens. I spent a nice peaceful evening cleaning all my seed collection that is in envelopes. Also - seeds should be stored in the dark, in paper envelopes.

I learned why soaking is necessary before you plant some seeds; they have to experience a couple of good rains before they germinate. Then they won't come up and get dried up because of one freak rainstorm. So you are removing the layer of germination inhibiting stuff that the first rain washes off.

Matt also recommended not tossing your seed flats if nothing germinates - he's had experiences where the following year they all came up in his compost pile because he had just given up and dumped them out. Let them dry out over summer and water them again next fall, and you might get a pleasant surprise.

I think my seeds are not getting enough sun, maybe not enough air circulation, and probably too much water. The main thing to protect them from is heavy rain that will flatten them. And critters.

When potting on seedlings, hold them by a leaf, and not by the stem. It's much easier to crush a seedling stem than a leaf. Who'd a thunk!

Another revelation was why we pot from seed trays to small pots and then to big pots. Matt explained that it is difficult to maintain proper moisture levels in pots that are much larger than the tiny plants with their little roots. Many of us had thought that intermediate step not worth bothering about. But the plants just don't thrive as well, apparently.

And - another surprise - Matt recommends using Osmocote fertilizer pellets! He said, I know - everybody says natives don't need fertilizer. Then he held up a fertilized and an unfertilized monkey flower plant in a pot. Big difference. He assured us that the nurseries pretty much all do this. Low nitrogen ones, and use about 1/4 of the recommended amount.

I met a pleasant person after the talk, who is writing a book on gardening with California natives, month by month - Such a good approach - It'll be published by U.C. Press - I'm looking forward to that one.

And btw I ordered a batch of new books when UC Press had a huge sale recently. I finally took the plunge and bought "Jepson" as it is known - a large and, to me, highly intimidating reference manual that costs $100 - on sale for half off! I've been told that it contains much useful and interesting horticultural information, as well as the identification keys that require a good bit of technical background to use. I'll let you know!

But you know what nobody seems to know? Why we call putting seeds in the fridge "stratification." Not a single person in the room, and there were many very knowledgeable people there, could give me the answer to that one. Do you know?