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The epigenous disk lacks indurate peltate scales.
Date: 1999 May 15 (Posted in newsgroups: scruz.events and rec.backcountry, as well as mailed to a few of my favorite relevant mailing lists. My apologies to those of you who decide to delete it twice.)
(at least, that's what I think he said)
Trip report, 15 May 1999 If you're headed northwest from Santa Cruz, up Highway 1 towards Point Ano Nuevo and Half Moon Bay, Swanton Road goes off inland just about a mile or so beyond Davenport. It loops up along Scott Creek, then climbs over a ridge and descends back to Highway 1 near the Big Creek Lumber yard, near Greyhound Rock. For migrating waterfowl, Scott Creek's marshy lagoon is one of the more important stops in the area. The Swanton Pacific Ranch is a recent (early 90's) gift from Al Smith's estate, to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It is about 3200 acres of land along the coast and inland, surrounding Swanton Road. See http://urbanfor.cagr.calpoly.edu/data/WebSites/swanton/swanton.html for a bit of detail about the Swanton area, history about Al Smith, and his little local "one-third scale" railroad.
The invitation, sent to scruz.general, said: Join skilled botanist Roy Buck and the California Native Plant Society in a tour of Cal Poly's Swanton Pacific Ranch. This is an area of unexplained hyperdiversity, containing over 600 native species. Many thanks to Cal Poly for hosting the outing and for their plant preservation programs. [...] Meet at the red house at 299 Swanton Road [...] The walk begins at 10 AM and ends at 4 PM. [...] So naturally when I got there (9:30 or so), there were TWO red houses next to one another, neither one marked with an address that I could find. There was an older gent sitting in a truck, studying the newspaper. Since I was so early, I just kinda wandered around a bit. I checked out the little train setup -- it's pretty impressive. Some visible activity had led me to assume that there was some kind of equestrian event going on that day, and after a while, an equestrian rode near where I had parked, asking me where the Vet Station is. I point down the trail, where I did earlier see a sign for that, and asked her what's up. It was a 30-mile-ride, a 50-mile-ride, and a ride-and-tie event, all going on at the Ranch that day. At about ten o'clock, no one had shown up for the botany walk, so I wondered whether the guy in the truck is "it" -- I asked him, and nope, he knew nothing about it, but said that "they oughta be along soon". Sure enough, some cars started showing up, and we kinda met:
Vince handed out copies of "Jim West's Amazing Swanton Plant List", a printout which contains a list of the latin names of somewhat over 600 plant species. One of them said that this is roughly 10% to 11% of the number of species in all of California (an unusually diverse state), which is pretty remarkable for such a small bit of land. A very few of the plant listings (serviceberry, dwarf nettle, umbrella sedge, and a few others) also showed the plant's common name, hand-written onto the list before it was photocopied. Jim pointed out one of the plants near us, and Roy pointed out the one Monterey Pine (Pinus Radiata) nearby; the Swanton area is one of only three spots on the California Coast where this tree is native (the others are Monterey and Cambria). Roy & Jim each gave us a bit of the history and pre-history of the area, and we started off. A great "California Nutmeg" grows here. One of the redwoods has wooden ladders leading right to the top, some 80 or so feet up. We were going to cross Scott Creek near here, and then climb up and over the ridge to the coastside hills, but there was more water than expected. After a few interesting words about the mixed-up sedges by the stream, we headed instead down along the narrow tracks, where there's a new bridge over Scott Creek, a half mile downstream. The original bridge was washed out during the El Nino winter, the new one looks pretty heavy-duty. There are photos of the old destroyed bridge, somewhere near that Swanton URL I gave above, e.g., at http://urbanfor.cagr.calpoly.edu/data/WebSites/swanton/data/ranch/1998Floods/Sc ott_Crk&RR_Bridge/RRBridge_north_end.jpg (sorry if that URL wraps badly). Across the bridge, the tracks ran another third of a mile or so, and we were shown some examples of some of the non-native plants that are invading this area (Cape Ivy, Forget-me-not, Vinca (Periwinkle)). Jim noticed an odd little bush along the tracks, I think it might have been a vetch or another sedge (I probably would never have identified it more precisely than "a little bush"). It was this bush that gave rise to the quote "The epigenous disk lacks indurate peltate scales," explained below for the persistent. Some of the time, I'd be just behind the two botanists for a bit, and hearing them talk with one another gave me a taste of what it must be like for non-computer people to listen to us computer nerds talk about bits, bytes, inodes, and virtual destructors. Refreshing to listen to botany nerds for a while instead! It was a cool afternoon, nice as we walked along the tracks. Near an open field, there was a rocky spot with horsetails growing uncharacteristically out from the rocks. (The terrain looked like there was an underground stream right there.) Horsetails are much older evolution-wise than fancy plants like trees and flowers. There's an awesome California Laurel right along here. The steep hillsides near here have a few patches of "vertical grasslands" -- areas where the soil stays too thin, the rocks too close to the surface, for anything larger than grass to grow. These spots act as windows to the past for botanists, since they prevent the normal natural succession of a grassy meadow to a bushy area to a forest to a shopping mall. :-) We climbed up a steep, badly-designed and eroded trail that led over a ridge, into some *serious* wind. This is just a bit above highway one, and we would hike into that wind for the next three or four miles. There are a couple of herds of cows along this area. One of the intentions for Al Smith's donation of the land to Cal Poly was for it to serve in part as a place to study sustainable agriculture, with an eye towards making it possible for agriculture to coexist with habitat preservation. We saw a few fine blue-blooming ceanothus bushes, lots of little flowers, sedges, thistles (including one native variety). There are a few places along here where they have built ponds to help out the California Red-Legged Frogs. On one of the beautiful purple thistle flowers, I spotted a weird-looking bright metallic green bee-like bug. Next time I saw another one on another flower, I pointed it out to one of the botanists and asked him what that was, he started to describe the flower. I said, "no, the bee". He didn't know. I looked it up later, and it turned out that it must have been an Ohlone Tiger Beetle. This is one of the species of some concern to environmentalists; there has been a proposal to designate them as threatened or endangered. [See http://www.santacruzpl.org/ref/endang/cicinde.shtml for details.] We finally got to a spot where we could head back inland over the hill and out of the wind. The group split up, as some of us had other things to do that day. There was a fairly steep climb down an almost-nonexistent trail, back to Scott Creek. At the "T" at the bottom of that trail, it wasn't clear to everyone which way to go. I figured that we had to go downstream, since we hadn't seen this spot earlier in the day. So the group split up again; some folks apparently found a dry crossing upstream a bit; those of us who went downstream just slogged through the stream and went home with wet shoes and ankles. A very fun day -- thanks to the Calif. Native Plant Society, to Charles Koester, Vince, Roy, Jim, and Al Smith.
Here is a bit of description of Al Smith and the Swanton area: http://urbanfor.cagr.calpoly.edu/data/WebSites/swanton/swanton.html I guess he started Orchard Supply Hardware. The CNPS page is at http://www.cnps.org/ "Epigenous?" I suppose it's not quite fair to have titled this trip report with a quote ("The epigenous disk lacks indurate peltate scales") that I did not explain. Here are summaries of the dictionary definitions of the words: epigenous - growing on the surface of a leaf or other plant part, esp. the upper surface, as a fungus indurate - hardened peltate - shield-shaped; specif. having the stalk attached to the lower surface within the margin (of a leaf) The context was that this particular variety of this species of whatever it was (sorry, Jim) had some ways in which it differs from the "normal" ones. At Swanton, the stalk with these disks on it is much harder (or softer) than expected, leading the botanist to suggest that this deserved designation as a subspecies. All of the alleged facts I write here are "to the best of my recollection", mistakes are my own, not Roy's nor Jim's.
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