Tag Archives: bladderpod

The Greek In Griffith Park

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Malosma laurina, laurel sumac

A keystone species in the ecology of the Santa Monica Mountains; it puts the Laurel into Laurel Canyon. Not really a laurel of course; but a sumac. (‘Early Settlers’ thought the leaves looked like European bay laurel (Laurus nobilis, Apollo’s bay, the leafed-crown-of-Fame. This seeing of bays everywhere was a trend…as we’ll see later.)

Peritoma arborea… the bladderpod. An Aristotelian freak, a kink in the Great Chain of Being, a living koan, Stoic philosophy in a shrub. I’ve read online, that the bladders make a spicy, crunchy snack, but you’ve got to first get past the offensive, orduriferous scent of the leaves to collect them. Consider that irony; you’ll go mad if you do, be tortured if you don’t.

  • CONSIDER THE BLADDERPOD
  • All that there is to know, the bladderpod knows.
  • Only consider, and you’ll know all the bladderpod knows, too.

The middle canyon (above Fern Dell, below the Observatory) is dominated by an olive grove. I’m almost certain the gnarled trunks and gray-green leaves signify Olea europaea — the gift of Athena to the polis of Athens on the day of its founding:

(The new citizens of Athens got to choose who would be their chief patron god. The field included all the local favorites, but in late polling it was neck-and-neck between Athena and Poseidon. To curry citizens’ favor, the Sea-god’s gambit was a violent earthquake that sent a hot salt-spring geyser gushing up through the Acropolis rock, running through the city and foaming through the agora. You could hear one hand clapping after this spectacle performance. Then Wisdom upstaged Poseidon completely by merely extending her bare arm, and offering the olive tree, which took root right there in the cleft rock. Critics raved, civilization ran, and word-of-mouth was great.) I have no idea why a grove of olives (wilsonii fruitless, I hope?) should prevail here, but maybe it was planted to offset the parchitecture for postcards. (Or they might be invasives…beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Maybe they’re Russian olives..I don’t think they’re Mission olive descendants.) Anyway, the grove is cool and lovely and thought-provoking to be under, and half-way hikers will be glad of the shade.

We have Plato to thank for the simple idea that God is perfect, and what is perfect is God, and nothing we see or do here on Earth is perfect, since we are not God, but we may glimpse intimations of perfection in nature and understand we must be in the presence of the divine, and are then capable of being invited to imagine the Ideal World of Forms just beyond the grasp of our physical senses. But if we can’t glimpse such perfection, and aren’t able to image the infinity of God’s Ideal Forms, we can still imagine that we can imagine perfection, from seeing things that aren’t perfect but maybe just awfully pretty — and hope and grace will do the saving rest. That’s the idea, anyway: add water and olive oil and it makes Western Civ. This graceful specimen is close to the Ideal Form of the lemonade berry tree. It is the Heddy Lamar of all the lemonade berry trees, balanced, tapered, stacked. Bright green leaves, vigorous growth. This is the kind of ideally beautiful lemonade tree, that fills the other lemonade berry trees with self-loathing and despair, and leaves them feeling stunted and hemmed-in and mis-shapen and cheated by life and doomed to hell, for sure.
Rhus integrifolia, the lemonade berry, from which berries in winter, a sweet-tart drink can be pressed.

THE STAR OF THE OBLONG THICKET

Patient Reader, recall that oblong thickets are good structures to look at, to spot rare chaparral plants. Here’s one such thicket just off the trail — and by gum there’s a Nevins barberry gesticulating proudly at the uphill end (and maybe another peeking out the back)! One of the rarest plants on earth, this example was not noted on the Griffith Park specimen map. This whole park, this gift of Griffith, this grant to Los Feliz, this Tongva glade, this wee bit hill and glen, just happens to hold the preponderant remaining world community of this dazzler of the CFP.

THE SPICY SCENT OF A BAY GROVE — Another CFP plant reminded California immigrants of Apollo’s noble bay tree, so they called it California bay. This magnificent tree is a bit similar to the European laurel, but it is completely unrelated. What is most remarkable is that this tree, by convergent evolution, exudes that heady bay fragrance, just like culinary bay, from oils in the leaves. Just like a grove of laurel in a Roman garden, Umbellularia californica perfumes the area under its canopy with divine scent.

“INSPIRING QUOTE HERE”: Col. Griffith J. Griffith made some inspiring statements when he donated the land for the park. He argued eloquently for the education of the masses in natural history, and uplift!, and progress, and trusting to nature’s regenerative powers. I know the quotes, but not verbatim. I blogged about them years ago, but couldn’t retrieve that article from my own blog. I may have reluctantly deleted the post when I temporarily ran out of space. Anyway now, those quotes, common coin for conservationists and reproduced in print and on bronze and terracotta plaques for 100 years, no longer exist. So I can’t document and illuminate for you, in his words, how much Griffith admired the Greeks and their democracy, and stressed common equality of access to nature and the good things of the polis. But I found out today we can no longer cut-and-copy blocks of text; you have to transcribe the whole text yourself from one screen to another, if you can even manage to hunt it down unedited and in one piece.

  • Fern Dell, the park’s prettiest grove, and a living museum.

Nor will Google bring up entries anymore for the old public domain books, histories or articles micro-fiched generations ago from moldering leather-bound tomes, which reproduced those remarks. Indeed, you won’t find any reference to a book or record that isn’t physically commercially in print by a major publisher and for sale (If the book’s for sale NOW on Amazon, Google will let you know it exists, but not let you see the text.) If nobody else has noticed what has suddenly and quietly happened, the View has. This is outrageous, this is Orwell; this is Himmler, this is the sack of the Alexandrian Library, this is rentierisme, this is the Dark Ages for man, this is the Inquisition, this is the final snuffing out of any hope for democracy. It is the Inquisition for our common knowledge, a permanent trap-door slide for our species down to eternal barbarism. If an individual fellow can not organize his own information, researching inexpensively and at his own pace and direction from the public sources bequeathed to us by Franklin and Jefferson and generations of scholars and dedicated public servants, but instead must crawl to the bot, taxed and tolled and kept ignorant of the richest sources, it is death for America. Here is the enclosure of the human mind; a kick in the head for public education, and the fatal blow to our common civic heritage. If this sticks (and some of Google’s outrageous ‘innovations’ mysteriously don’t), there’s almost no point going on from here. Sigh. With that, enjoy the the plants, they might not be here very long either.

In Valley Village, Um Valley Village, Um Valley Village Herum August 2019

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Unlike Ulm, Valley Village now (finally) has Sunday DASH service to Studio City and Van Nuys. [Modified rapture!] Cheer with me; DASH is the only mode of LA transit that gives real time arrival info, instantly, right on your cell phone. Just enter the stop number — unlike Metro, there’s no sprinting for DASH at the last minute and cracking your phone against the lamppost trying to catch a bus that suddenly flips its sign to “Out of Service.” So let’s flee the ghastly house, hop on the DASH, and explore what delightful sights await the Sunday Valley passenger for his/her/their/hem four bits.

The weather is cool; a Pacific breeze is skipping up the River bed. Fog fingers stretch over the passes and stroke the Valley as if it were a warm cat’s belly.

Valley Village. It looks like a fairy tale, don’t it? A great place to call home, if you’ve got a nickel left and they don’t think you’re dead.
  • I know in the 40’s this all was supposed to look whimsical, but the gloom brings out the creepy “The Prisoner” side of Storybook Gothic. Still, it’s Home.
Hmm…they obviously heard the View was on board. Okay, the View shuts up and does it THEIR way….
  • Greens and reds
  • …shimmer in the gloom
  • The old sign behind the Post Office lot.
  • Earth-loving heart above the Mighty Los Angeles
  • Eucalyptus and pink oleander, down by the river, Studio City

Behold the brand new — just last week! — re-greened section of the LA River between Whitsett and Coldwater. Mayor Garcetti and Friends of the LA River and the Mountains Conservancy can all be proud. The gates here are breathtaking; thank the Cohn Family. And thank friends of [cinematography god] Haskell Wexler, among others, for all the sculpture contributions. It is glad and wholesome news in the Valley. Let Heron point the way.

  • Consider the bladderpod
  • in memory of
  • …Haskell Wexler
  • The Hirsh Family Habitat Walk
  • Beautiful buckwheat
  • Momoy
  • Blue elderberries
  • Prunus californica, wild cherries
  • Wow diggit — almost Amsterdam School
  • Studio City Fire Station
  • Oh..oh right. Sorry.
  • Van Nuys Civic Center!
  • The frieze is worth enlarging
  • Plumeria loving life outside the Van Nuys Library, under renovation.
The Art Deco Valley Municipal Building, our own “City Hall” in downtown Van Nuys. 1932. P.S. you still can’t fight it. BUT — you can now legally cross the intersection on the diagonal. Hail Progress.

Thanks for the dash, DASH! Dash it — gotta dash!

Consider the Bladderpod…

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Peritoma arborea. A species that toils not, neither does it spin. It is not only native but endemic to Southern California; bladderpods grow here, thank you very much, and they tolerate no place else.

More bladderpods, at the Sepulveda Dam


Bladderpods did nothing at all to sustain the Tongva. Nor did they lift a pistil to help the Chumash. Never, throughout the entire Spanish and Mexican periods of Alta California, was a bladderpod mentioned with delight by the Franciscans, nor was its bark used as a folk remedy on the ranchos. Neither did the pods draw comment from the keen-eyed Yankee land hustlers who ended up owning their scrub habitats.

The pods, which could have a nutritious, gummy carob-y center that tastes like a combination of figs and chocolate, don’t.

The mounding shrub has silvery leaves that don’t give off that California spicy, sage-y, woody aroma when stroked. In fact, if you provoke them with a caress, they smell awful. Bladderpods just want you to go away. Maybe that’s why we snubbed the stuck-up things, by giving them their ridiculous name. Nobody thought to call them “Heavenly Bean.”

If bladderpods were ever asked, as James Watt demanded of the elephants, to learn to pay their own way in the world, it’s hard to see how they could. Anyway, they don’t need us humans, either. They passive-aggressively find their own water. The 118-degree day this July didn’t sear them, it only fostered more absurd, inedible fruit. Bladderpod flowers are cozy with the hummingbirds and pollinators; but of course the plant squanders everything it gains, on merely making more bladderpods.

We’re drawn to wildlife refuges for the flash-boys and high-fliers, the white pelicans of the world, who have no trouble getting publicity. Bladderpods ride the coat-tails of the charismatic mega-fauna. But even if the pelicans saved a thousand acres of sage scrub habitat, I’m sure the birds wouldn’t hear a word of thanks from the bladderpods.

Native Plants at El Alisal

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Lummis was editor of the “Land of Sunshine” magazine, and over his career did much to inspire thousands of people to move to Los Angeles. He was very interested in conservation, and he tried to get the whole Arroyo Seco set aside and preserved (unnecessary note: he failed.) The three-acre meadow garden is a bit overgrown, but a good-faith effort has been put in by the Parks Dept. to turn it back over to California native plants; it makes a captivating, half-wild setting for this fine house.

Sweet desert acacia, with its golden puff-balls.
I’d love to know what kind of tree this is…with its fuzzy orange balls.
A lovely bladderpod — with sweet gold flowers and namesake appendage dangling
It’s hard to see, but there’s a bronze bell in the gable. Traditionally, not only the Missions, but every Californio rancho had its bell. The belfry seems especially romantic set against the autumn yellow of an Oregon ash tree.