Flora

Chaparral at 2,300 feet: manzanita, toyon, black oak, buckeye, and blackberry that grows anywhere it likes. Then, in the middle of it, about twenty fruit trees that are there on purpose.

The Garden of Idunn

Idunn is the goddess who keeps the apples that hold the gods' youth. The orchard has her name because that is what an orchard is for.

It was planted to ripen in sequence rather than all at once: it opens with Methley plum, very early, and closes with a Granny Smith apple.

Two native black oaks stand in the middle of it. They were here first, and the orchard was planted around them.

What grows here without being asked

Buckeye grows down by the falls that carry its name, and lupine along the trail named for it.

Blackberry has leaves of three like the poison oak does. It is not poisonous, and it does not let go either, so carry pruners.

The standing dead oaks in every photograph here are what the Butte Fire left in 2015.

The trees we lose

Some of the fruit trees have died: heat, and drip lines that failed while nobody was looking. Walking the sprinklers is one of the jobs here: slow, finishable, and the tree is either watered at the end of it or it is not.

Plants of the land

Whiteleaf manzanita

The first thing in flower here, and often the only thing. Pink urns in January, on a shrub that peels itself red.

Chaparral currant

It flowers when nothing else does. That is the whole point of it, and it is why the hummingbirds stay.

Golden fleece

The Butte Fire made this plant's decade. It came up through the burn and it is now one of the commonest shrubs on the land.

Deer brush

Cream plumes over the whole hillside in April, and seed that can wait decades in the ground for the next fire.

Yerba santa

Sticky, resinous, and named holy herb by people who used it for a cough long before anyone wrote it down.

Mountain misery

Ankle-deep fern-like mats under the oaks, white rose flowers, and a resin that sticks to everything that walks through it.

Twining snakelily

The only snakelily that climbs. It uses the shrub next to it to get its flowers up into the light.

Shooting star

Swept-back magenta petals on a bare stalk. The shape is not decoration: it is a set of instructions for a bumblebee.

Woolly Indian paintbrush

The red is not petals, and the plant is not feeding itself. Both facts take some getting used to.

Yellow evening primrose

Opens at dusk, worked by moths in the dark, and orange and collapsed by the next afternoon.

California everlasting

Papery whether it is flowering or setting seed, which makes it the hardest plant here to date honestly.

Toyon

White flowers in June that nobody looks at, and red berries in December that everybody does.

Canyon live oak

One tree that looks like two, and an acorn cup that settles the argument in about ten seconds.

The blue acorns

They are not from a blue oak. Almost every source asked about them says otherwise, and almost every source is wrong.

Silver bush lupine

The tall lupine: a woody, silver-leaved shrub to about 150 cm, holding violet spikes above the burn.

Sky lupine

The short lupine: an annual, ankle high, that turns a whole hillside blue for about three weeks in April.

Buckbrush

The other ceanothus. Stiff, grey, wedge-leaved and evergreen, and it flowers a month before deer brush.

Black oak

The tree the Sentinels are. It is also the one that comes back from the root after a fire that killed everything above ground.

Poison oak

It is not an oak, it is not always a shrub, and it does not always have green leaves. The one thing that never changes is the three.

Yellow starthistle

Not a thistle, not from here, and fatal to horses. This one is a problem to be managed rather than a plant to admire.

California buckeye

It drops its leaves in August, not November. The falls are named for it.

Ponderosa pine

Needles in threes, and bark that smells of vanilla in the afternoon sun.

Incense cedar

Not a cedar. The flat sprays are the field mark, and pencils are made of it.

Western bracken fern

One of the most widely distributed plants on earth, and it stands green in dry grass in August.

Common mullein

Not from here. A rosette of felt one year, a two-meter spike the next, and then it is dead.

Bull thistle

Not from here, and the spiny wings running down the stem are what name it.

Himalayan blackberry

Not from here, and not going anywhere. The fruit is the reason the fox and the bear come through.

Northern California black walnut

Native to California, and almost certainly standing here because somebody planted it.

Sierra iris

Pale yellow, low in the dry grass, and it grows nowhere outside California.

White morning glory

A native vine with a flower twice the size of the introduced bindweed it gets mistaken for.