I have been known to go on a "hike" and never leave the parking lot, and when I lead a group to Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve, sometimes we never make it past the reserve gate. Our lack of speed is due to our interest in putting a name on every plant along the trail.
I am a botanist - more specifically a plant taxonomist, someone who classifies and names plants. Some call me the "dead plant lady," because I kill plants on a regular basis - not just in my yard, but for my work. When I explore a new area, I take a large selection of plastic bags for collecting plants, often causing quite a bit of mirth among my botanist friends who like to call me "the bag lady." I retaliate by making them carry the bags.
When I am done collecting for the day, I use a plant press to flatten and dry the plants. My plant press is a wonderful scientific tool that was in wide use by the 18th century and hasn't changed much since. I place each plant specimen in a fold of newspaper, place the newspaper between two pieces of blotting paper, place cardboards on either side of the blotting paper, and so on, until the press is as large as its straps can handle. Then I place wood slats on either side of the press and compress the whole contraption by tightening the straps.
When I take apart the press several days later, the plants have been flattened and dried. I then glue them to sheets of archival paper, and my notes on each plant's geographic origin and habitat are made into labels and also glued to the paper. By this process, the plants I collected are transformed into herbarium specimens that are filed and preserved in the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity herbarium. Herbarium specimens, the oldest dating from the 16th century, and are the basis for most of the information known about the distribution and morphology of plant species.
The earliest herbarium specimens that I know of from the Putah and Cache Creek watersheds are housed in the UC Berkeley herbarium. There is a specimen of spice bush collected in Napa County in 1862 by William H. Brewer, botanist for the California Geological Survey, when he visited Wragg Canyon. By the late 1880s, other plant taxonomists were collecting in Yolo County, including Willis Linn Jepson, who wrote the first complete flora for California and after whom the Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California) is named. Jepson, a native of Vacaville, collected plants in Putah Canyon near Winters. In 1892-1893 J.W. Blankinship, a teacher at Hesperian College, a small school in Woodland, collected widely in the Cache Creek watershed and left his specimens at UC Berkeley before going east to Harvard.
Although botanists have been collecting herbarium specimens in and around the Cache and Putah Creek watersheds for about 150 years, there are still botanical discoveries to be made. In partnership with Craig Thomsen at UC Davis, Gordon Harrington of Esparto, Tuleyome's Yolohikers, the Bureau of Land Management, a gardening group in Guinda, and a host of volunteers, the Center for Plant Diversity has taken on a survey of the BLM Payne Ranch in southern Colusa County. This wonderful place, just south of Bear Valley, has typical oak woodland, grassland, chaparral, and riparian habitats. But it is special, because large sections of the ranch have serpentine-influenced soil that is low in calcium, making for a generally inhospitable plant environment. Many native California plants have adapted to tolerate such soils, whereas most non-native plants have not.
Because of relatively easy access and amenable terrain, Payne Ranch is a good place to involve volunteers in plant collecting. This past spring, we advertised our collecting trips on Tuleyome's Yolohiker listserve and to a group of gardening volunteers in Guinda. To date, 44 people have been involved in our collecting efforts at Payne Ranch. We collected 295 different types of plants, and we know there are many more plants to find. Also, due to the presence of serpentine soils, Payne Ranch is a good place to look for rare plants. Among those that we have documented are: Jepson's milk vetch, round-leaved filaree, adobe lily, pink creme sacs, adobe navarretia, and Hoover's lomatium. We have also found a spearscale that we can't identify that may be a new species - truly a rare find.
Closer to Davis, we have been exploring the Blue Ridge. After Tuleyome purchased the Ireland Ranch, they invited the Center for Plant Diversity to conduct a floristic survey of the property. The terrain is moderately steep and at first didn't seem promising in terms of finding novel or rare plants, because none of the specialized soil types that sometimes harbor rare plants or novel occurrences are present there.
However, we collected several plants at the Ireland Ranch that have never been documented by herbarium specimens as being present in Yolo County (oso berry, shrub interior live oak, and coast live oak), and we found one rare and endangered plant (Colusa layia). The most likely reason that oso berry and shrub interior live oak had never been collected here is lack of opportunity for botanical exploration. Up until now, most of the area surrounding Ireland Ranch has been somewhat inaccessible, either because the land was public but with no public access or because the land is privately owned. Tuleyome is developing a docent program for limited public access to the public land at the top of the Blue Ridge near Lake Berryessa.
Once we wrap up our exploration of Ireland Ranch itself, it is time for a botanical survey of the top of the Blue Ridge. Let's see what other botanical discoveries are awaiting us up there!
- Ellen Dean is Curator of the Herbarium at the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity (email@example.com). Tuleyome, a local nonprofit working to protect both our wild heritage and our agricultural heritage for future generations.