FALL COLORS DEPT.
They don’t want folks in here for a very good reason: this is LA’s water supply. But it is important for citizens to connect with the divine places. If you’ve got limber knees and honor the sagebrush and ask Chinigchinich and know the right access points to pull over for an hour — ah! que cela suffise. Big Tujunga Canyon, on a breezy bright November day. This is Scorpio time, the best of the year.
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It doesn’t spell the thrill of first-nighting, but an October hike by Pacoima Creek offers a paint-box of California fall colors. We do have seasons here, and they can be dramatic, but like most Easterners, I had to learn to appreciate these dry but diverse and teeming landscapes. It took me years to see “all that brown” as surging with life-forms that are perfectly fit for their eco-system (Alluvial Fan Foothill Chaparral, I think, classifies this habitat.)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11KI3fS1kbBjYobLvRT3-5aZHiAeWnCoN/view?usp=sharing
Remember our visit last spring: the creek was rushing, and the valley was green and full of lupines and wildflowers. (Click the link above for awesome footage of the Mighty Pacoima.)
Today the valley floor is streaked with rust-red buckwheat, slowly ripening to burnished orange-brown. The hills are brown and tan and olive and sage. The bunch grasses glow green-gold against the gray dust, and the broom is tipped with yellow and puffing out white. The huge papery leaves of the sycamores are just beginning to blaze yellow. Enjoy the View!
Patient Reader, remember how we left Lopez Canyon last February. Green was the scene; we Viewed with rue the Spanish Pasture Mix; we admired the charcoal-rich oak soils; and we marveled at the merry bear-currant bushes sprouting everywhere. Like this:
Recall also the live oaks; their farmer-leaves (agrifolia) create, moisten, nurture, and preserve in place, the soil. View this oak terrace, in three moods: winter, spring, and summer.
LOPEZ CANYON: WHY CARE, AGAIN?
This is the fall of the spring’s Superbloom. Last winter brought unprecedented rainfall. A year before that, a terrible fire purged the canyon; much was incinerated and the tree trunks were blackened, including the oak groves. (The fire followed on decades of nagging drought, which had left these hills scrabby and bare.) This remarkable sequence is giving the native plants an excellent toe-hold to recover and thrive here. The last time weather conditions were this good, decades back, Lopez was the municipal dump; roads were being cut and graded, etc. But now the dump is curbed, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has charge of the land, and the biome can at last catch a breath and set seed for the future.
I’m fascinated by how the natives responded to the rain. The chaparral is as vibrant as can be. Note how the plant communities have negotiated an intricate pattern of “personal space” among and between species, capturing ridge-lines, rationing out soils, specific minerals, and water among the survivors. (Note how the diagonals mark out the watered spots.)
The saw-tooth goldenbush is a chaparral beauty growing tall and louche by the side of the road. Here she can set her fluffy achenes to drift with the traffic like California bindlestiff-men, to set themselves up further down the pike.
One the most elegant trees I’ve ever seen — a red-osier dogwood, dangling fat clusters of white berries. It’s tough to see, but the osiers (twigs) are bright red. They were used by the Indians in basket-weaving. The tree sets red, green, and white (Viva Mexico!) against the ringing blue sky, to make an especially lovely sight in this Land Of Contrasts.
“Ethnobotanic: Native Americans smoke the inner bark of redosier dogwood in tobacco mixtures used in the sacred pipe ceremony. Dreamcatchers, originating with the Potawotami, are made with the stems of the sacred redosier dogwood. Some tribes ate the white, sour berries, while others used the branches for arrow-making, stakes, or other tools. In California, peeled twigs were used as toothbrushes for their whitening effect on teeth (Strike 1994). Bows and arrows were made from Cornus shoots. The tannic inner bark was used for tanning animal skins.”
— USDA/NRCS website for Western dogwood
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.
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.
The Valley Village View 