THE CALIFORNIA FLORISTIC PROVINCE/
SAN FERNANDO VALLEY NAT’L. GEO. MON.

For Patient Reader Down East: Sticky Monkey–flower!

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The golden face-pullers are a glory this month in all the SFV Canyons, and throughout the coastal Golden State. They epitomize the integral relationship of the CFP and its complex mineralized soils. Monkeys are a great example of how protecting one, protects the other. (Photos from Elsmere Canyon, Griffith Park, and Laurel Crest.)

Mimulus aurantiacus — the “little orange mime,” “little golden joker.” (Too delicate and Victorian to use the word ‘sticky’ in conversation? Call it “Bush Monkey-flower.”) It’s recently been reassigned its own genus in the Jepson Manual.

California natives in every way, monkeys prefer spots with coastal breezes and half-day sun; and elevations like eyebrows, crowns, and canyon cliff faces, where they dangle and lure zooming hummingbirds.

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They are specially evolved to tolerate local conditions, including serpentine soils. And as Viewed, they have no problem coping with the mineralizing vapors of hydrothermal vents, skarns, and porphyries. In fact, they seem to seek these formations out. Blast ‘em with your copper salts, your sulfides, your ammonias and hydrocarbons and metasomatizing acid baths. Ha ha! Let the invasive brome and bracken lie slaughtered on the field, their husks bleached, chemically scorched. The hardy CFP monkeys will just peek over the edge, and laugh and laugh, their goofy heads nodding moronically.