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.
“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.
Any respectable View finds it hard being shut in, and the Valley Village View is no exception. Even the cats seem to long for the blooming sage of the San Gabriels, but seeing the peaks are shrouded with fog, they despair.
What with the rain and the coronavirus and all, the locked-in View can only take solace in the hiking memories of yesteryear. (The cats are on their own.)
A year ago, April 10, 2019, things were different. Remember, Patient Reader? You were there…. It was the Superbloom…we drove into the hills, and clambered up Big Tujunga Canyon. You’ve suppressed it; forgotten, but bring it back now, to soothe and heal. Who knows, maybe you’ll remember what we discovered that day about the CFP. Bask in the sunshine, inhale the fragrant spring breeze, feel the scratch of bracken on your itchy shins…
Sages for ages; sagebrush for rage-hush.
Filla you lunga
…inna Bigga Tujunga
The roadcut coming in. Chunks of this chic Art Deco black-and-pink rock
…lie all over the Valley floor.
I think these formations are what they call “sheeted dikes”
Folded up like an umbrella, and uplifted
Eriodictyon californicum, or yerba santa, cures respiratory ailments so well it’s called “consumptives’ weed.”
Black sage, S. mellifera
Below, a sage with flowers that are a vivd dark blue. It has basal leaves, rather than up and down the stalk; and the whole plant is slender and gracile. It took me a while, but I finally reckoned that this is CHIA, which is a true sage, Salvia columbariae. Who knew? Well, J.P. Harrington, for one, who recorded so much Chumash lore about chia as staple food and medicine, that Jan Timbrook of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum wrote a fascinating paper on it.
Growing with the sage, California bluebells and clarkia
Phacelia campanularia
View now, deep into the middle canyon.
Penstemon
Virbinum dentata, which isn’t native here, but to the Southeast. I haven’t found any references to it in California. There was quite a bit of it in Big Tujunga. Invasive? But beautiful.
Ceanothus blooming like wisps of smoke
Ascending the ridge, fire has obviously taken a toll on the oaks. This huge survivor, clinging near the top of the canyon, anchors its own little woodland terrace, with sumac and sagebrush, and the trail itself, as dependents.
Old burnt boles, big as boulders, and massive trunk sections, some broken, some saw-cut, litter the willow-thickets lower down in the canyon.
View of the east wall as you climb the west ridge.
Yucca whipplei, ‘Our Lord’s Candle’
This mugwort, A. ludoviciana, came up from the Big Easy and got herself a yucca-daddy for protection
The yuccas were as high as I got that day; this is the View back down the canyon. The sunny land behind the mountain is the SFV, which receives all this watershed. The peak is Mt. Eaton, highest point in the city. In fact this entire View is within the City of the Angels. Go ahead and gasp; I did.
Whan that Aprile with her showeres soothe put the California Floristic Province into a Superbloom, I found a little knoll in Lake Balboa Park so full of fragrant sage and sweet yellow elderflowers and spicy artemisia, that I had to snap a few shots for the blog. Some of the plants i hadn’t even identified, hoping to look into them later. The kasili — white sage — was truly out of this world.
White sage, as tall as the crown of your head
One reason I took so many pictures last spring was that I knew there were only a few weeks until the hot summer would transform the landscape again, and that fires should be expected. Sure enough, in late July, when the weather finally got hot, a wildfire started jumping around that quadrant, which is a notorious homeless jungle. The conflagration was quickly extinguished by the LAFD, and a week later I took the trolley over there — I was curious to see how my little knoll had fared.
I was hoping to find it okay; I was prepared to find it blackened. Instead, it appears the heat of the fire, which must have raged very nearby, or else just flashed through, had not consumed but simply toasted, every living thing on the knoll. What’s left is a shoulder-high crust of crispy dried mustard and California native plants, in place, burnt out, but not burnt up. It looks ominous — like fuel for the Fire Next Time.
Still, having learned something about the fire resiliency of California plants, I am eager to return during the rainy season. I’m keen to see whether the knoll comes back into bloom with its previous population, or whether it has to start rebuilding the CFP from scratch, while competing against wave after wave of the invasive Spanish Pasture Mix.
“Along the rivers there is a strip of bottom-land… where magnificent oaks, from three to eight feet in diameter, cast grateful masses of shade over the open, prairie-like levels. And close along the water’s edge there was a fine jungle of tropical luxuriance, composed of wild-rose and bramble bushes and a great variety of climbing vines, wreathing and interlacing the branches and trunks of willows and alders, and swinging across from summit to summit in heavy festoons. Here the wild bees reveled in fresh bloom long after the flowers of the drier plain had withered and gone to seed.”
— John Muir, “The Mountains of California,” 1894
Young Valley Oak
Quercus agrifolia, the farmer-leaf.
Populus fremontii, the Fremont cottonwood
Long vines of wild grapes, Vitis californica, dangle, while canes of bear currants — Ribes aureum — shoot up from the stream bank. Both leaves shimmer like neon in different light.
Wild grapes grow in profusion in the Southcoast Valley Riparian habitat.
The Valley Village View 