Teaching Southern Californians About Southern California

I’m a member of the California Native Plant Society. I haven’t been a member very long, only about eight or nine years. As part of our outreach and education efforts for our local chapter, I lead hikes through some of our canyons and open spaces in which I explain to folks about the native flora and plant communities here. This past weekend I conducted a hike through Florida Canyon, a fairly well preserved native area in Balboa Park.

            I grew up in Appalachia, a place where, even if you didn’t eat them, everyone took note of the Mayapples, whose broad green leaves would blanket forest floors in early spring. In late summer we picked blackberries and in fall we would gather walnuts.

Besides the fruits and nuts that we would harvest and eat, most folks had some notion of the flora around them. It would be impossible not to notice the azaleas and dogwood trees blooming in springtime. And people had some idea of the oaks, sycamores, and elm trees growing around them.

San Diego is far different. We have two plant communities that are native to the coastal area where the city is, coastal sage scrub and coastal chaparral. Whenever people talk about these plants, if they talk about them at all, they are usually just called “brush.”

The landscaping around our houses and along our highways is all from somewhere else. We plant eucalyptus from Australia, iceplant from southern Africa, palms from the south Pacific and Mexico, and scores of other plants from the Mediterranean and South America. What we have made is some sort of international never-never land and is ubiquitous in our landscaped environment. It is possible to wake up in the morning, drive through your neighborhood, fight traffic on the freeway, and make your way to the office park where you work without seeing a tree or any other kind of plant native to southern California.

So for a lot of folks, even for people who have lived in southern California all or most of their lives, it can be an astounding eye-opener when I explain to them about the native sunflowers and sages that live in the canyons and open spaces around them. Many of them have never been up close and personal with their natural environment.

For southern Californians to be so cut off from our natural environment does have consequences. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for cleaning, drinking, bathing, and other purposes. San Diegans use about 150 gallons a day, more than 65 percent more. Those 60 additional gallons that we use every day are used to water our lawns and nonnative plants that we have planted in our lawns and parks.

This water we ship in from hundreds of miles away. Half of our water comes from the Colorado, which is so overused and drawn upon that it usually dries up before it makes its way to its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. Also, shipping all that water takes effort. It’s estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is used to move water from one point to another, which has implications for energy security and climate change.

So folks join me on these native plant hikes. I hope they learn something and maybe appreciate their native environment. I hope that it somehow makes a difference.