In Praise of Coyote Brush - Baccharis Pilularis

I have had the pleasure this spring of visiting with a neighbor who is learning about landscaping and native plants and, with the help of a class, is working up a design for a mostly native plant garden around her south-facing home. It's been a pleasure to talk with someone who so easily sees the many benefits of native plants, for drought tolerance and wildlife value, and for the aesthetics of a garden appropriate to the rugged area we live in. So it was a bit of a jolt to hear her declaim, as we walked through the chaparral area:

"Oh I got lots of those, what are they called, greasewood bushes? I hate those things. They're very flammable, I was told. And they get all that white stuff on them in summer, it's so messy."

I realized she meant our native and abundant Baccharis pilularis consanguinea, and its "summer snow" (so dubbed by someone on the Gardening with Natives Yahoo! group). The picture at the top of this post shows the seed heads just beginning to open. Bushtits and lesser goldfinches gobble them up in the golden days of late fall.

"Oh, no - This isn't Greasewood. Some people call Chamise greasewood. That is very flammable. Other things are called greasewood too [Sarcobatus]. But these are Coyote Brush. I really like Coyote Brush. Not nearly so flammable." I looked at them with her eyes and then with my eyes. So much of the pleasure we take in plants (and other things) originates between the ears.

It's true our native coyote brush can get very straggly. I've pulled out long long branches easily twenty feet long. They stay where they die and add to the fuel load.

But according to this fire management page on Las Pilitas Nursery's web site, healthy coyote brush are pretty good for flammability. The "leaf burn" page has long lists of burn times - how long it takes a leaf of each species to ignite with a blowtorch. - The writer doesn't claim these are scientific results - just one person's practical test, a person with a background of many years experience as a volunteer firefighter.

Baccharis is in the "greater than sixty seconds" group, which is the best group. Lower on the page he shows the flammability ratings of many popular non-natives, like lavender and various other Mediterranean plants used for drought tolerance. Lavender was in the 20 seconds group. Quite a lot of them were more flammable than the natives.

I don't actually know what the difference between 20 and 60 seconds means in terms of surviving a wild fire. The writer also says (along with other web sites on the topic) that the most important way to improve defensibility is to maintain good hygiene (weed clearing) and to plant thinly in the "defensible space" areas around the home, avoiding "fire ladders."

But it does seem a shame if people remove perfectly wonderful chaparral habitat because they fear fire, then replace it unwittingly with more flammable non-native alternatives.

Besides their fairly good marks for fire (I've seen it burn on the burn pile so I'm not so sanguine about consanguinea as all that), the Baccharis that grow here are fun because they are so easy to trim up, and they stay pretty for quite a while. You start out with a shaggy wild looking shrub and end up with something light and airy looking. The wood is soft and easy to cut, and they take the pruning without blinking a lenticel. Did I mention that Baccharis remain green year round, without irrigation?

Baccharis volunteer in our south garden area regularly, and I've let a few of them grow to about three or four feet, before cleaning up their hairy legs. I'm a beginning pruner, so if nothing else, it's good practice.

I should mention that along the coast nearby another variety of coyote brush grows low to the ground, Bacharis pilularis pilularis. A few more local varieties are less widespread. B. douglasii likes moist habitat, and slender leaved B. viminea, AKA B. salicifolia, is also called Mule Fat because mule deer browse on it.

Low-growing Baccharis cultivars are widely used as drought tolerant ground covers. Twin Peaks is popular but has shortcomings, and I understand Twin Peaks II is an improved cultivar. Santa Ana and Pigeon Point varieties are also favored. I tried growing Pigeon Point but it did not thrive here, on the steep slope where I wanted to use it for erosion control. I also am now concerned about inadvertently creating hybrids - I'd like to keep the local natives pure (though I hate how that sounds!) but that is probably a vain hope. And I'm reluctant to rip out my Dr Hurd manzanita too as it's finally getting a bit larger and is pretty. I'm conflicted!

I like looking out my office window at my little trimmed up coyote brush. There's not a lot else to look at right now in this area, but that's another post! Sometimes a bunny takes shelter under it. Here is a Bewick's wren I saw last week, poking about at the foot of the bush for insects.

Wrens are so tiny and pretty and intent.

The topic of those fluffy white seeds came up again yesterday, when I was honored by a visit from my Town Mouse co-blogger, and we took a turn about the garden. She had yet a different objection.

"I heard they reseed freely and I just don’t want them all over my yard!"

But I had an answer for that: they are dioecious, and nursery trade stock is all male.

The Las Pilitas web site entry for Baccharis says this could have bad consequences:

The problem for we horticulturists/biologists is that only male plants are utilized in the landscaping trade for Baccharis pilularis. If these are substituted for B. pilularis var. consanguinea in ecological restoration, there will not be as much seed set and recruitment of new individuals.

(http://www.laspilitas.com/nature-of-california/plants/baccharis-pilularis-consanguinea
accessed 6/17/2009).

Ya, not going to get far trying to restore a habitat with a bunch of guys and no gals. I don't have that problem - and I guess that’s the downside for this Country Mouse – they do freely seed everywhere there is bare, disturbed or cleared soil, though hardly at all where there is mulch. Where we cleared in the lower chaparral area a couple of years back or so, we now have a carpet of foot-high striplings, and I'm not sure what to do about them. I should probably have scuffed them when they were one inch high.


I am entertaining the thought that I could keep them low with hedge trimmers, at least in one well defined area. They do provide some cover for the bunnies and I regret the shelter that we have taken away. Those straggly intertwined branches of old chaparral shrubs were like roof beams, creating open spaces beneath for the lesser animals to hide and forage in. But we'll see.

In other news, the house finches who nested in the Webster may or may not have raised their family. The female sat on the nest quite a lot, and I think I saw a couple of open beaks demanding food. The parents hung anxiously around for quite a while after they stopped sitting in the nest, then disappeared for a few days. I never saw a young one out and about, no full grown babies pestering mommy to keep on providing food. (There's a lot of that going on right now, and testy mothers chasing them off to get their own food). I have a fear that the babies fell out of the nest and our ever alert rat terrier gobbled down the tasty and much anticipated snack in a quick and guilty gulp.

But now they're back, and the female is sitting in the nest again. I see her little head when I look through the garage door. Sometimes she flies out when we go out to the garage, and sometimes she just hunkers down. I hope they have good luck.