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THIS WEEK IN
CALIFORNIA WILD

Reviews

California's Wild Gardens: A Living Legacy, edited by Phyllis M. Faber. Published by The California Native Plant Society for The California Department of Fish and Game, Sacramento, California, 1997, 236 pp. $42.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This splendid book might be mistaken for a "coffee-table book": oversized, copiously illustrated, but with minimal text of little substance. Look again! This is the Mother Lode of California plant books, with many precious nuggets inside its covers. More than 100 amateur and professional botanists, ecologists, entomologists, and other interested citizens were asked to write short pieces about their favorite botanizing sites in California. The preface refers to these places as "hot spots," localities that support unusual assemblages of rare or endemic plants. But many non-hot spots are also included, that is, botanically rich but otherwise mostly unexceptional locales (such as Lake Winnemucca and Colusa County's Bear Valley). A disclaimer: I am among the authors included here and was asked to introduce the San Francisco Bay Region, which is too large and biologically diverse to qualify as a hot spot. But the Bay Region hosts a number of interesting hot spots, ten of which are described expertly by individuals who know them well. They range in size from imposing mounts Diablo and Tamalpais to tiny Antioch Dunes and Edgewood County Park.

No corner of the state was missed-the North Fork of the Smith River, the Modoc Plateau, Algodones Dunes, and the Channel Islands are all here. The brief descriptive text for each place encapsulates its distinctive ecological and botanical features and the accompanying photographs convey what words can only suggest. Photos of two lilies and an iris face a page devoted to a view of the North Fork of the Smith River, a region described as partly protected but vulnerable to losses from mining, recreational activities, plant collecting, and the Port Orford cedar root disease. The Modoc Plateau (mostly "federally owned," with some unique areas set aside for protection) hosts fields of daisies that rival the displays of the Central Valley, vernal pools with downingia, wet meadows with camas, and forests of the "stately" Washoe pine.

Coverage of Algodones Dunes (70 percent of their area is open to off-road vehicles) features photos of the peculiar root parasite called sand food, a daisy, a view of some dunes apparently devoid of plants, and a sidebar picturing and discussing the desert fan palm. The Channel Islands form a region of their own. Most of these islands are managed variously by the National Park Service, private conservancy groups, and the U.S. Navy. These organizations have removed or reduced populations of introduced animals that have devastated their floras. Some brief but dramatic comeback stories are told here: a few plant species thought to be extinct have reappeared following removal of the exotic animals, and formerly rare species are increasing their numbers.

The photographs range from landscapes to close-ups of flowers and occupy more page space than the text. These came from the collections of several dozen individuals and are beautifully reproduced. Interesting facts and observations that are not yet in the vernacular are found on every page. Much is said about the preference of many plants for unusual substrates-the familiar serpentine, and the less familiar carbonate, limestone, marble, and sandhills all have their distinctive plant species. The essays are free-standing and do not assume that the reader has read elsewhere in the book. Common and scientific names are both used to identify plants however often a species is discussed. Some common names were invented when none existed, or were modified from those in common use. The scientific names mostly conform to Jepson's 1993 manual, but some do not.

Despite the vastly different backgrounds of the numerous contributors, the writing makes the contents accessible to a wide audience. Even professors have abandoned their arcane lexicons and use adjectives like "stunning," "magnificent," and "gorgeous," to refer to plants that deserve them, or phrases like "another darn yellow composite" (not so politely rendered in the field) to less resplendent sunflowers.

The book contains some errors, mostly minor ones. The legend to the photos on pages 78-79 confuses Sonoma sunshine with tidy-tips and also with Burke's goldfields. On page 147, the photo identified as the common sunflower (Helianthus annuus) surely is of a different yellow composite. The leaves aren't right and common sunflowers do not grow at 10,000 feet in California. Coast redwood was relegated to Sequoiadendron on the dust jacket, although correctly placed in the text.

This important book displays, in a most splendid way, the botanical riches in California at the end of the millennium. It describes the measures that have been taken to preserve these treasures and the numerous instances where threats still exist. Even well-intentioned wildflower enthusiasts pose a hazard: their visits to favorite areas result in inadvertent trampling of the plants they have come to admire. The book spells out convincingly how "each of us can help in some small way to preserve California's rich botanical heritage"--a challenge for the next millennium.

Let us hope that what remains of the diversity and beauty of our state's threatened natural gardens, so sumptuously displayed and described in this magnificent book, can be preserved.

Robert Ornduff

From the Editors' Desks

Tis the season for beautiful, photo-driven nature books, and we can't remember a year that produced so many worthy ones. If you didn't receive these as gifts during the holidays, you might consider trading in those unwanted or already-read books you did receive for some of the following:

California, by Ansel Adams, edited by Andrea G. Stillman with an introduction by Page Stegner (Little Brown, 1997, $50 cloth), is a collection of California's greatest photographer's black-and-whites excellently reproduced and combined with brief, eclectic excerpts by 20 authors, from Walt Whitman and Mary Austin to Jack Kerouac and Emily Post. If you've forgotten for a moment that California has the most beautifully textured light, landscape, and people on Earth, this book will remind you quite completely.

Frequent California Wild contributor Barbara Sleeper collaborated with photographer Art Wolfe to produce Primates:The Amazing World of Lemurs, Monkeys, and Apes (Chronicle Books, 1997, 24.95 paper), a survey of our closest evolutionary relatives. From the palm-sized pygmy mouse lemur to the muscle-bound, 400-pound mountain gorilla, the authors' subjects are captivating. The book's splendor is muted, however, by the sober fact that unless fundamental conservation measures are taken, fully 20 percent of existing primate species may be extinct 30 years from now.

The season's most astounding book of wildlife photography is Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters with the Animal World, by Frans Lanting (Taschen, 1997, $39.99 cloth). It gives new meaning to the expression "coffee-table book": for one, it's so substantial that it could be a piece of furniture. For another, this lavish book is almost completely devoid of text, so you don't have to feel guilty for skipping over pages of print. Only short descriptions in an appendix begin to answer some of the many questions begged by Lanting's photographic provocations. The conquest of image over substance? Who knows, but the more than 140 animal photographs, shot around the world in the past 20 years, are mesmerizing, unpredictable, and often very funny.

Mother Nature: Animal Parents and Their Young by Candace Savage (Sierra Club, 1997, $27.50 cloth) certainly ought to have been released in May, but no matter; its subject matter-variations on the universal relationship that binds one generation of mammals to the next-is perennial. Photographs, by a variety of excellent nature photographers, illustrate text covering the lack of "responsible" fatherhood (in nearly all mammals but primates), infanticide, the evolutionary significance of lactation, the ramifications of birth order in rodents, as well as more philosophical musings about the parental emotions of non-human mammals: "We cannot know how animals feel...but at times their actions invite us to draw conclusions. When a mother elephant carries her dead calf on her tusks for days on end, putting it down only to eat and drink, and when a monkey reaches out to stroke her sleeping child so gently it does not wake, we know that we are seeing something familiar...variations on the theme of mammalian motherhood."

Winter 1998

Vol. 51:1