Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
I’ve learned this is wand buckwheat, Eriogonum elongatum. The wands wave in wild winds on wuthering heights…whereas, workaday wooly buckwheat is wont to wallow a world away, in washes and wadis:
CalFlora.net: Eriogonum – from the Greek erion, “wool,” and gonu, “joint or knee;” that is, wooly puffs on jointed stems.Fasciculatum – ‘the one clustered together,’ fascicular = in bundles or clusters.Sawtooth goldenbush, Hazardia squarrosa. Lopez Canyon is where I first marveled at these elegant Asteracea, waiting along the side of the road as if I were the parade they were lined up to see. They are so common, yet so erect and poised…as if a fleabane or back-alley dandelion got into a Swiss finishing school. Its prickly holly-leaf is the convergent evolutionary choice of many chaparral plants, to retain water and deter browsing. Convergence makes it easy to confuse all the weedy yellow asters and false dandelions. For instance, one kind of goldenbush is called grindelioides, which means “like a grindellia.” And there is a grindellia with holly-sharp leaves just like the sawtooths, called Grindellia squarrosa var. serrulata. I think below is an example of the latter. Anyway, they’re all lovely.
From CE Conrad’s 1987 US Forest Service field guide to chaparral. Note the taxonomy change: the genus was Haplopappus and the species was squarrosus, not squarrosa. Zheesh! Botanists.
“Medicinal Uses: The medicinal use of gumweed dates back to Native American and folk times and it was listed as an official drug in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1960. The slightly bitter and aromatic tea may be used for bronchitis or wherever an expectorant is needed; as an antispasmodic for dry hacking coughs (alone or often combined with Yerba Santa). It is believed to desensitize the nerve endings in the bronchial tree and slow the heart rate, thus leading to easier breathing; it merits investigation as a treatment for asthma. The tincture is useful for bladder and urethra infections. Tincture or poultice may be used topically for poison ivy and poison oak inflammations. Other indications include bronchial spasm, whooping cough, malaria, other chronic and acute skin conditions, vaginitis and as a mild stomach tonic. Native Americans (tribes including Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux [Lakota and Teton Dakota], Crows, Shoshones, Poncas, Blackfeet, Crees, Zunis and Flatheads) used preparations of curlycup gumweed both internally and externally as washes, poultices, decoctions and extracts to treat skin diseases and rashes, saddle sores, scabs, wounds, edema, asthma, bronchitis, cough, pneumonia, cold, nasal catarrh, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and syphilis, menstrual and postpartum pain, colic, digestive ailments, liver problems and as kidney medicine. The fresh gum was rubbed on the eyelids to treat snow-blindness. Effects: stimulant, sedative, astringent, purgative, emetic, diuretic, antiseptic, and disinfectant. Primary constituents: Tannins, volatile oils, resins, bitter alkaloids, and glucosides Other uses: Ornamental- it produces flowers over along period, even when the soil is poor and dry; young, sticky flower heads can be used as chewing gum; leafless stems can be bound together to make brooms. Contraindications: The herb is contraindicated for patients with kidney or heart complaints. There may be concentrated levels of selenium as it is a facultative selenium absorber.” — http://ayurveda.alandiashram.org/ayurvedic-herbs/grindelia-squarrosa-gumweed
Jepson’s doesn’t cite the common name for this flower, which is curlycup gumweed. (Maybe they were too embarrassed to mention it.) One might choose to chew the sticky flowers as gum; it’s also called Tarweed.
“Californ-i-ay, where the rain doesn’t rain, it just drizzles champagne.” — Yip Harburg
We finally had a real winter storm, two days of nice soft rain. Thank the Elye-wun, or whose-ever long white beards those are, flowing over the hills.
The hollyleaf cherries greeted me as if they were Irish Spring models, fresh and perky.
The deerweed has pinked up remarkably; the tired wilted look is gone everywhere. It’s a pioneer species in recovering disturbed areas: it cleverly fixes nitrogen in the soil, preparing for fertility.
The star of the show is an elegant hunting-pink buckwheat variety, Eriogonum fasciculatum, only this strain seems very gracile, and ripens to ruby red, not orange-brown.
The gracile buckwheat strain blooming white, and the deerweed in gold, in the June, 2020 Superbloom.Comparing the LOC buckwheat, left, with your common-or-garden variety, right.
Re-capping from Feb. 2019:
January, 2019. Hills bare, contrasts extreme, and the creek bed was streaked with oak-char, but…potential!
Here’s one year later, Spring 2020:
January, 2020
In August 2020 we had a single-day spike of 118 degrees, and everything then alive, sizzled, I thought to death. By Christmas Day of 2020, after months of no rain, the hills had roasted up brown and crispy.
Christmas, 2020. Looks pretty fried, doesn’t it? But one month, and a couple inches of rain later:January 29, 2021. The land is filling in with “Foothill Alluvial Fan Chaparral.” It’s far more diverse than ever.
It’s close enough to meet “exercise within neighborhood” guidelines, so it’s the perfect place to get some vitamin D and socially distant exercise. (Sadly, nobody goes to look at native plants. To 99% of Angelenos, these are “the tules,” the weeds, the sticks, the scrub, the wash, the concrete canyon, the waste place. Thus to escape Angelenos, native plants are a sure resort.)
The color palette of sage scrub is about subtlety; the sophistication of grey-green.
It’s been a torrent of a spring, changeable and tempestuous, weather that is itself a fun thing just to be out in, when every winged creature is cheeping and buzzing and flapping and croaking and cawing and wheeling overhead in a Wedgwood sky. It’s been torture every day to resist going out in the weather, to see what flowers have popped.
Phacelia calendula, California bluebells. Only two plants, but that’s all you need to tango.
Prunus illicafolia, the holly-leaf cherry. The only cherry in the CFP. The flesh is delicious when ripe; the pits are highly nutritious, when the toxins are leached out by soaking. The pits were pounded into flour for a special kind of tortilla, or even a kind of honey-sweetened confection, like halwah.
To keep my weekly “parole” legal, focused and therefore efficient, instead of walking aimlessly, I’m planning to do a week-by-week photo-document of how this patch of scrub grows and develops through the season. Jepson couldn’t have asked for a better laboratory. In the next few weeks you can watch, with me, as Tujunga Wash Comes Out; the San Fernando Valley’s Oldest Spiring Debutante. (Ignore the concrete dress, writes Dorothy Kilgallen; Tujunga’s an Army Corps brat; but she’s got good breeding. She’s descended from Big Tujunga on one side, and Little Tujunga on the other; so there is good potential here.)
The Island snapdragon, native to the Channel Islands. Galvezia speciosa. Hummingbird, bee attractor.
Smog-free skies have contributed to this very robust growth. Pollution is even more toxic to the CFP than it is to traditional North American landscapes, so this is a good spring to monitor a smog-free bloom (we hope, the first of many.) Below, the lupines are going crazy; lupines and cholla and sunflowers? What an amazing habitat.
A very young laurel sumac leafing out…
Mature laurel sumac: life’s the berries.
The spring’s sole, bellwether, buckwheat flower…
Eriogonum fasciculatum
Baccharis salicifolia
Mulefat, a sweet-smelling key species for riparian habitats. Take this away and the birds and bees go, too.
We just had a week of record rainfall. too. But even with the sparkling air and the Midas touch of sunshine, this biome feels like it has found its feet at last; that individual plants are at last working together, merging into that emergent organism, the aromatic, wildlife-attracting, self-evolving scrub.
Black sage, Salvia mellifera
It’s the black seeds that give the name. Sage seeds, highly nutritious, were a staple for the Indians.
White sage, Salvia apiana
White sage, keystone of Coastal Sage Scrub. It has fragrant, almost pungent leaves, good for smudging.
I had no idea sage could grow old enough to develop a gnarly, grapevine-style trunk.
In coming weeks, if I’m not in a ventilator, watch this space to see those white sage spikes fluff out in flower.
To wrap up the annual celebration of mortality, the View explores the mythic theme in the California Floristic Province. Every year the sun brings beautiful buckwheat to rusty-brown perfection, that is, death, around Halloween. It signals the season the way fat orange pumpkins do back East; and the fall colors of roasting buckwheat are as gorgeous as maple leaves. For a few weeks, the floors of canyons and arroyos are streaked with bloody red stains, where the winds and the ants gather drifting buckwheat chaff. Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Buckwheat.
Eriogonum fasciculatum. California buckwheat, a keystone species of scrub and chaparral. Its grains make a very edible flour; pioneers made batter for pancakes by sifting the tiny grains from the sun-burnished flowers. The Tongva and Tataviam taught them how; this was a staple in their diet. It is highly nutritious, with a pleasant, nutty, earthy taste. In the Missions, the Neophytes practically had to force the Franciscans to allow them to add it to their atole stewpots.
The flowers are worshiped by bees, who turn it into California’s tastiest honey. (I’ve seen bee hive crates stationed near stands of buckwheat in the Verdugos and in Little Tujunga Canyon. I wonder if I can demand these varietals at the Studio City Farmers’ Market? Watch this space…)
The ants also make this a staple. They gather the crop, thresh out the chaff, and store the grains underground. Buckwheat often grows with sagebrush and white sage, as here at Tujunga Wash. See how clever the ants are at separating and storing their foodstuffs:
The Valley Village View 