Roots of 2 Cultures Share Common Ground at Garden of Native Plants

Amid the thorny cacti and red-tinged manzanitas of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, Paulino Rojas imagined that the border between California and Mexico was gone.

It is a vision that often strikes Rojas, a biologist at the University of Baja California in Ensenada, as he wanders through the 86-acre garden near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Surrounded by the plants of the California Floristic Province--a unique region of vegetation that extends from California into the Mexican state of Baja California--Rojas says man-made boundaries rapidly wither.

“We have the same ecological area,” Rojas said during one of his frequent visits to the Claremont garden. “The border is just an artificial line.”

That notion is firmly rooted at Rancho Santa Ana, which is the largest botanic garden to focus on the native plants of California and Baja California. The 1,500 varieties of plants on the lush grounds include nearly one-third of the region’s native species, about half of which are found nowhere else in the world.

Similarities Span Border

The similarities between California and Mexico are more than just geographic, said Thomas Elias, Rancho Santa Ana director.

Because people on both sides of the border have traditionally used native plants for a variety of nutritional, medicinal and religious purposes, Elias said, the shared flora also reflect a shared culture.

“The plants form a bond between the two cultures,” Elias said. “We should be aware of protecting that heritage and preserving it.”

That theme, promoted recently during an “Alta California-Baja California” open house at Rancho Santa Ana, is kept alive by a diverse group of botanists, chemists, anthropologists and herbalists, as well as many Latinos and native Indians living in California and Mexico, who view the plants of this region as a kind of natural supermarket.

In numerous interviews, these scientists and amateur gardeners have described how this region’s vegetation has for centuries been peeled, stripped, boiled, milked and fried by people of the Latino and Indian cultures for cooking, healing and religious ceremonies.

“It’s interesting how people who might have had very little contact with each other managed to find similar uses for plants,” said Eloy Rodriguez, a plant chemist at the University of California, Irvine, and a recent lecturer at the botanic garden. “A knowledge of those plants made it possible for people to survive.”

Some of the plants growing at Rancho Santa Ana, for example, have been used to produce items commonly found in today’s society, such as tequila, which is the fermented juice of agave, or jojoba oil, which is added as a cleansing agent to many cosmetic goods.

But most of the native plants yield products not found in the average kitchen or medicine chest, such as the meat of the nopal cactus or the acorn meal of the oak or the pungent teas of various wild herbs and shrubs.

“If you compare it with the dominant, white European culture, the native people had an understanding of plants . . . that they were to be used,” said Dorothy Pool, who regularly discusses native plants on the “American Indian Radio Hour,” a weekly program on KPCC, the Pasadena City College radio station.

“Rancho Santa Ana is preserving the heritage of native plants, as well as the heritage of early Californians and Indian people, from here and from Mexico,” she said.

Despite some differences between the Latin and Indian cultures, as well as variations among the plant species used, the heritage being preserved at Rancho Santa Ana is still very much alive in many California gardens today.

Pool, for example, an expert on the native Gabrieleno Indians, uses many of the plants and herbs that grow in the backyard of her San Marino home for food, medicine and religious practices.

Examples of Uses

Wild berries are crushed and used for jam, flat-top buckwheat is steeped in water and applied as an eye wash, and white sage is dried and burned ceremonially by the Indians to purify the soul.

“Anything you put on you or in you is medicine,” said Pool, as she pointed out native plants during a recent visit to Rancho Santa Ana. “Food is medicine, and that’s closely tied to religion.”

Guadalupe and Fausta Pinto of West Los Angeles use a variety of plants from their home garden, such as yerba del manso, a low-growing perennial thought to reduce swelling or infection, and ruda, an aromatic herb that they place under their pillows or in an ear to relieve a headache or ear infection.

“People eat a lot of junk food,” said Fausta Pinto as she surveyed the plants in her lush backyard. “These have so many good properties.”

And Josefina Garcia, who came to California from Mexico 65 years ago, says that a day hardly goes by that she does not eat the nopal cacti growing behind her East Los Angeles house.

“Nobody ever explained it to me,” Garcia said of the plants and herbs she uses. “All the Mexican people know about it.”

Tradition Faded Away

But Garcia’s granddaughter, Becky Daniel, lamented that the family’s tradition of plant use stopped with the 80-year-old Garcia.

“Once you become Americanized, it’s so much easier to go to a drugstore or go to a doctor than to find out how much of what plant to use,” said Daniel, a Claremont resident who often takes children in a nearby day-care program to visit Rancho Santa Ana.

Because many of the plants also are becoming endangered, Rancho Santa Ana has taken an active approach toward documenting and cultivating threatened species, Elias said. About 80 species of threatened or endangered native plants are growing at the garden.

“With the great pressure on this area for development, the (California Floristic) Province faces a higher threat of extinction than almost any other area in the country,” Elias said.

Botanists recognize about a dozen floristic provinces in the country, differentiated by their topography and climate as well as by their flora. The California Floristic Province is the only one to have a Mediterranean climate. Its moist winters and dry summers make it the richest floristic province in North America, Elias said.

To promote sharing of the resources of the region, Elias and Rojas have established an exchange program between Rancho Santa Ana and the University of Baja California under which scientists from both countries can work on joint research projects.

“Rancho Santa Ana is a prototype,” Rojas said. “They are doing things we would like to do in Mexico.”

Moved From Orange County

Founded in 1927 by Susanna Bixby Bryant, whose husband was the personal physician for the Henry Huntington family, the botanic garden was originally located on the historic Spanish land grant of Rancho Santa Ana in Orange County.

In 1951, the garden was moved to Claremont, where a graduate program in botany was established in collaboration with Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate School. As of 1985, the Claremont Colleges had awarded 39 doctoral degrees and 53 master’s degrees in botany through Rancho Santa Ana’s program.

With 750,000 samples in its herbarium and more than 30,000 volumes in its library, the garden is an important resource for botanists around the world, as well as a living museum for the 70,000 visitors who strolled through its unique grounds last year.

Located at 1500 N. College Ave. off Foothill Boulevard, the garden is open seven days a week, although it will be closed for the Fourth of July. Admission is free.

19 Plant Divisions

The botanic garden, which is divided into 19 plant communities, each representing a different climatic region of the floristic province, features a desert garden, a coastal garden, a woodland trail, a riparian trail, a conifer collection, a lilac collection and a manzanita display.

Even among other Southern California botanic gardens, Rancho Santa Ana overshadows the competition.

“Why should we waste valuable acres on native plants when we know Rancho is so good?” said Suzanne Granger, curator of the herbarium for the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia. “You really get the sense and smell and feel of California there.”

And for Rojas, noting that this state was once a Mexican territory, the feel of California is also the feel of Baja California.

“This is an international area,” he said, peering across the botanic garden. “If you want a border, put it near San Francisco.”