September 2004

©Joe Medieros

Living Lightly

Rivers of Birds, Forests of Tules: Central Valley Nature & Culture in Season

By LILLIAN VALLEE

10. Wild Fruit in a Dry Land

A friend, Judith Lowry, was celebrating a summer birthday and had invited a circle of friends, who share an interest in native plants, to join her at her home and garden in a small coastal town (which shall remain nameless to discourage lurid thrill seekers but which boasts at least a dozen municipal anthems). The excitement of going to Judith’s is always tremendous. Will we have toasted hazelnuts and dried huckleberries with our morning oatmeal? Will we be roasting bay nuts or preparing nettle soup? Will we get enough chia cookies and lemonade?

Judith is the author of Gardening with a Wild Heart: Restoring California’s Native Landscapes at Home, a lyrical and thought-provoking book about the beauty and despair of gardening with native plants. I buy this book over and over again because I am always running into someone who urgently needs it, and there it goes; no one ever wants to give it back. Judith’s book is an exploration of why local native plants are so conspicuously absent from our gardens. After all, they are the ones who know how to live in the heat or fog, with or without a lot of light, with or without water during some of our scorching summers.

Most native plants also represent one element in an entire community of plants, insects, birds, and other animals attuned to one another’s cycles of blooming, seed-making, migration, and reproduction. Why, she asks, are we so reluctant to value and reestablish around our homes the very plants engineered to handle, with grace and beauty, all the climatic and hydrologic challenges of our various California regions? Why, instead, do we favor high maintenance, often invasive, plants that devour exorbitant amounts of water, fertilizer, time, and disrupt the age-old community relationships?

The answers are not simple, but one reason has to do with what we have learned to see and not to see. These questions have been much on my mind as I take a daily walk in East La Loma Park, along Dry Creek. The heat feels oppressive until I reach the “kingdom of shade” provided by Valley oaks refrigerating the creek bank. Mature Valley oaks, with their deep tap roots and intricate lateral root systems, are water storage tanks in the summer, holding hundreds of gallons of water. The weeping branches with clusters of leaves huddled, it seems, against the sun, form a pool of protective coolness around the base of the tree and there is no more pleasant place to be on a sultry afternoon. If there are birds around, this is where they are, too: scrub jays, acorn woodpeckers, or a restless pair of sharp-shinned hawks.

I have often watched little league baseball teams, cheerleading squads, soccer parents, and other locals drift toward the shade of the monarch oak in the La Loma Junior High schoolyard. The temperature there is clearly lower than in the shade of nearby mulberry or ash trees. Yet the Valley oak or its partner, interior live oak (jays often plant them side by side along Dry Creek), not to mention other local native trees and shrubs (black walnut, wild rose, elderberry, golden currant, California blackberry, wild grape, strawberry and gooseberry) are rarely thought of as integral components of our gardens which, on whatever scale, could help sustain ecosystem health.

One sure way to appreciate native plants is to eat them. In Gardening with a Wild Heart, Judith writes:

In order that the smells and colors particular to this place be joined by the tastes particular to it, once a year I immerse myself in food preparation tasks involving our local plants. At our annual spring open house, the menu may include roasted bay nuts, pinole made from blue wild rye, sugar cookies studded with chia seeds, miner’s lettuce on cheese and crackers, manzanita berry tea, and chia seed lemonade. We may not eat like this most of the time, but the ritual acknowledgment and honoring of this aspect of our local plants has come to feel compelling enough that I find myself preparing these foods and adding to the menu every year. (11)

Along the banks of Dry Creek, in 105 degree heat, a bumper crop of green acorns is ripening on the Valley oaks; wild rose hips blush and come into their scarlets; clusters of wild grapes beckon to strollers; and black walnut flourishes. Along the dry and dusty paths, scraggly elderberries, often on the eastern/northeastern side of large oaks, enjoy the morning sun and afternoon shade and dangle clusters of berries, the ripest already picked off by birds.

Blue elderberry (Sambucus caerulea, mexicana) is one of a group of shrubby trees often referred to charmingly as “the elders,” members of the honeysuckle family. Our blue elderberry has flat-topped and delicately fragrant white blossoms in April (which are supposed to be delicious fried in batter) and pithy twigs and branches that can be transformed into musical instruments. For this reason California Indians also refer to elderberry as “the tree of music” whose branches they season and fashion into ceremonial flutes, whistles, and clapper sticks. The clusters of almost black berries are cooked and used to make tasty jams, syrups, pie filling, and wine. The brewed bark was used by native peoples as a remedy for fever, and the leaves are reputed to calm bee and nettle stings.

The coastal elder (Sambucus callicarpa) has different leaflets and bright red berries, said to be inedible if not poisonous to humans but relished by sheep and birds. And it is this red elderberry that I associate with a favorite spot in Judith’s coastal scrub plant garden: an outdoor shower. Enclosed by a tall fence and paved with large flagstones, it waters the thriving red elderberry and other moisture-loving natives that peek over the enclosure. The berries feed migrating songbirds. The design of the outdoor shower signals an accommodating thoughtfulness in meeting human and non-human needs.

I leave Judith’s house with a small bagful of hulled, unshelled California hazelnuts, soft leaves still attached, gentle reminder that we live in a nourishing landscape whose bounty we can learn to see and cherish, to accommodate and ingest.

Sources: Judith Larner Lowry, Gardening with a Wild Heart; Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of Western Trees; Howard E. McMinn, An Illustrated Manual of California Shrubs; and Glenn Keator, Complete Garden Guide to the Native Shrubs of California.

Lillian Vallee is a Professor of Literature and Language Arts at Modesto Junior College.

• Read Part 1, "A walk in the vanishing wonderland of oaks"

• Read Part 2,  "Thunderwings and Mightyfins: Nature on the Move"

• Read Part 3, Wild Garlands and Underwater Tangos

• Read Part 4, Paradise and Poison Hemlock

• Read Part 5. Macro-sky, Micro-birds

• Read Part 6. Animal Byways & Hitchhiking Cysts

• Read Part 7. The Quickening, The Alamo

• Read Part 8. Squirrels in the Willows!

• Read Part 9, Lithuanian regional traditions

Modesto city water system to be upgraded

By MYRTLE OSNER

A recent Modesto Bee editorial pointed out that California is running out of water.

Two days later Peter Cowles, Modesto's Public Works Director, spoke to the League of Women Voters of big changes ahead for our water system.

For some years, all new development has been required to install water meters, and the development paid for them. But the meters haven't yet been read. Soon, meters will be required by state law citywide, though installing them in old neighborhoods remains a vexing and expensive problem. This will provide a big incentive to save water since everybody will be equal when everybody has a meter.

Along with this change, the Modesto Irrigation District and the City will expand the water treatment plant on the Tuolumne River that already serves much of Modesto. Water pressure is falling on high-use water days and much of the infrastructure needs rebuilding. Many wells are closed due to contamination (natural and man made), or they are just pumped out to the bottom.

Complicating this picture is the differential rate structure started when the City bought the old Del Este water system. The previous Council refused to raise rates, which were intended to be raised gradually. So to pay for the system, residents are in for a big water bill shock. The two systems have differing rates, which need to be equalized. Further complications: Modesto City water system also serves the communities of Waterford, Hickman, Ceres, Grayson, Salida, and the Del Rio area, all part of the old Del Este system.

Plus, storm drains in the summer carry more water than they do in winter, unbelievable as it may seem, due mostly to overwatering those nice green lawns.

DO YOUR REALLY NEED ALL THAT GREEN? TIPS FOR WATER-WISE GARDENING

Who needs a front lawn anyway? You can convert at least part of your garden into a water-wise planting like those already existing in several Modesto places.

If you aren't willing to dig up your lawn, at least cut back on watering. On my morning walks I invariably see two or three yards whose sprinkler systems are going full blast into the street. Down the gutter, that precious water will never be drinkable again. California can't afford water wasters. Water is our most precious resource.

The first step, of course, is get rid of the grass. It will take a while. If you leave even a little bermuda grass it will come back to haunt you.

Start by making a plan. Fall is the best time to plant drought tolerant plants. You will need to order them in advance, since most local nurseries don't carry much in the way of natives (the best of the drought-tolerant plants). First, visit some gardens that are good examples, such as the new one next to Modesto’s Great Valley Museum on Stoddard and College Ave. I always welcome people to come and tour my garden, which has been in for ten years, so you can see some mature plants. (check out the shrubs, such as salvia, manzanita, spice bush, lemonade berry, etc., and ground covers, such as zauchneria.) Don't forget to plant your wild flower seeds IN THE FALL, spring is too late. You will be rewarded with a variety if you plant a Central Valley wild flower mix, or just try California poppies to begin with.

The Hughson Arboretum is gearing up to raise money to develop its demonstration garden on several acres on Whitmore and Euclid in Hughson. Most of it isn't planted yet, but they have an interesting plan going.

Contacts: Great Valley Museum, 575 6196 or Gail Clark, 572-2030. Hughson Arboretum, 883-1114. SF Garden for the Environment, 415-731-5627. To order wild flower seeds in quantity contact Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, 888-784-1722.