Advertisement

California’s Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions
Review by Rachel Ehrenberg
Web edition : Friday, November 21st, 2008
Text Size
access
California’s Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions by Richard A. Minnich

"The land was very green and flower-strewn,” Pedro Font notes in a 1776 diary entry describing fields near the Los Angeles River where the city’s Civic Center stands today. The journals of early Spanish explorers are the only detailed records of California’s herb cover before introduced species began spreading across the state, writes Minnich in this dense, vivid and painstakingly meticulous account of the Golden State’s botanical heritage.

With a source list as rich as the state’s flora once was, Minnich describes the ebb and flow of California’s native and invasive plants, presenting evidence including newspaper articles, writings of early American botanists and records of local flora used as binding material in adobe bricks. He presents an exhaustive survey of existing documentation and provides a lens through which he reminds readers that beauty is in the eye of the recorder. While botanists later conducted broad surveys, earlier records were collected with a mind for agriculture and practical use. Purpose shaped documentation.

Minnich also revisits, and questions, stalwart notions of the state’s botanical history, such as the bunchgrass-grazing hypothesis—which blames the disappearance of native bunchgrasses on opportunistic, nonnative plants, such as wild oats. He details how the influx of cattle, sheep and forty-niners shaped and reshaped the landscape, as did the accompanying plants.

Not quite a dirge, Minnich’s account also notes years where natives have burst into bloom—most recently in 2005. With effective management, much of the flora need not be lost. In fact much of it is waiting, “banked” as seeds in the soil.

Univ. of California, 2008, 344 p., $49.95


Comments 1

Please alert Science News to any inappropriate posts by clicking the REPORT SPAM link within the post. Comments will be reviewed before posting.

  • Let's hear about the photos, illustrations etc. How many, quality, size of book, size of illustrations.
    Charles Crail Charles Crail
    Dec. 15, 2008 at 7:34pm
Registered readers are invited to post a comment. To encourage fruitful discussion, please keep your comments relevant, brief and courteous. Offensive, irrelevant, nonsensical and commercial posts will not be published. (All links will be removed from comments.)

You must register with Science News to add a comment. To log-in click here. To register as a new user, follow this link.