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 found fossils of shellfish in fragments of freshly fallen conglomerate on the trailside of Pacoima Creek, between Lopez Dam and the Lopez hills.
They are reminders, miles from today’s shoreline, that the San Fernando Valley was once embayed, the playground of scallops and clams. Later all that shallow bay muck was uplifted — crunched up — by convergence of the migrating West Transverse Range fault block against the edge of the North American craton. The line of suture where the fault block docked (at San Gabriel Fault) is now just a couple of miles north of this spot.
Moules frites?Deviled littlenecks?I frutti di mare…petrificado; en croute.Only the shell of its former self.Fresh yellow-green mineralizing fluid?
As Previously Blogged: This year’s long rainy season is bringing a landscape transformation. At the top of the Valley — that brown-baked sprawl of industrial blight where the 210, the 5, the 14, and the 118 tangle — that dusty Kansas of the soul, from which sore eyes are usually averted — I found a Technicolor Land of Oz.
Whatever mental pictures you have of the San Fernando Valley, here’s a cool mountain breeze to blow them out of your brain.
Above are arroyo lupines, Lupinus succulentus, which prefer growing close to the stream bed. On the west-facing slopes are found the famous California wild lupines, Lupinus perennis.
Sambucus mexicana
…in Spanish, “sauco”
…in English, the blue elderberry bush.
Calystegia macrostegia
…the wild morning glory.
Native plants holding their own against invasive brome and Too Much Mustard…
Triteleia laxa
…called “Ithuriel’s spear”
…after the weapon wielded by the angel in “Paradise Lost.” Dites moi, pour quoi?
Broom, I presume
….and in bloom!
Phacelia campanularia
…or, California bluebells.
I gently pulled some brome to give the bells more room to swing.
The only flashes of red in the meadow are from two shrubs. First, the invasive castor bean plant, which was introduced as a cash monocrop, failed, escaped, and has naturalized all over California. They are awesome, dread plants to behold, quite otherworldly. A cheerier red comes from the budding leaves of the laurel sumac.
Castor bean plant
… a naturalized exotic.
Malosma laurina
…a young sumac, supporting a wild cucumber vine.
These burrs
…are bitter, poisonous cucumbers.
The sage started blooming this week
Giant coreopsis, known as “tickseed,” from its confusion with some other flower that has tiny tick-shaped seeds.
The Valley Village View 