Botanist’s Belated Reward : 61 Years After She Found a Plant on the Dunes, It May Turn Out to Be a Unique Species
Tramping through the El Segundo sand dunes in the spring of 1932, botanist Bonnie C. Templeton came across a strange-looking plant that didn’t appear in any of her botany books.
She named her discovery Pholisma paniculatum for the tiny flower clusters that appeared on the surface of the sand. But when a well-known botanist published a book on the flora of Southern California a few years later, he refused to recognize her find.
Templeton, who believes that the scientific Establishment at the time was reluctant to recognize female botanists, further despaired when the plant seemed to disappear from the El Segundo sand dunes amid a boom in beachfront construction. The wrong, she feared, would never be made right.
Half a century later, however, the plant has made a surprising comeback on the dunes, which are now being restored. And that has rekindled an old debate over whether the plant, which resembles a tiny head of cauliflower, is different enough from a similar-looking desert variety to qualify as a separate species.
Templeton, who says she never stopped thinking about the odd plant she found in the dunes, hopes botanists researching the matter will confirm her finding, that the plant constitutes a distinct and separate species. But even if they don’t, the plant’s mere reappearance is a salve for the remembered slight.
“When I first heard they had found it, I almost cried over the phone,” said Templeton, who lives with her husband near Glendale, in Glassell Park. “It’s like, if you lost a diamond ring, and after all those years, finally it was there. To me, it’s that much of a treasure.”
Templeton’s discovery was no fluke. When she spied the plant in 1932, she was a budding botanist who six years later joined a team of scientists to conduct a formal survey of the plants and animals living in the El Segundo sand dunes.
Despite her early disappointment, Templeton’s career flourished. She became the curator of botany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, where she organized dozens of plant shows and often lectured. Her extensive knowledge of plants and their habitats made her popular with police and sheriff’s detectives, who frequently called on her to help solve murder cases in which the evidence included plant material.
Her success, however, was tempered by what she believes was a pattern of discrimination against women in the sciences.
At one point, she says, the head of the biology department at USC told her no woman would get a doctorate in botany as long as he had a say in it. Templeton, who had received both her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree at USC, obtained her doctorate at Oregon State University.
The discrimination, she says, continued throughout her career. Whereas museum officials frequently ordered books for her male colleagues, she had to purchase her own. When she asked for an assistant to help with her workload, officials refused, she said, even though most male department heads had assistants.
“From the beginning I suffered discrimination,” said Templeton, who retired from the museum in 1970. “Even after I got my doctorate, it took a whole year before anyone would call me doctor.”
The deepest wound by far, she says, came in the early days of her career, when she was unable to get official recognition of Pholisma paniculatum, which she was sure deserved to be designated a distinct species.
Templeton, who declines to give her age, saying only that she is “plenty-nine,” does not remember the date she stumbled across the plant, but she does recall her first impression of it.
She had come to the dunes, which at that time covered several hundred acres stretching from the south end of El Segundo to Playa Del Rey, to collect samples of native plants. She had already collected dozens of specimens. But, she recalls, there was something intriguing about this one. It lay scattered like mushrooms on mounds of sand.
“I was surprised when I first saw it,” Templeton said. “I thought, ‘This is different from anything I’ve seen on the dunes so far.’ I didn’t really know what it was.”
She dug into the sand to find the plants’ root system and was further surprised to see that the flower heads sat atop an underground network of long, succulent branches. The plant, she discovered, was parasitic: The main stem extended up to four feet underground and anchored itself on the roots of coastal buckwheat.
She compared the plant with another parasitic plant, Pholisma arenarium, which is typically found in the desert. But, she thought, this one was significantly different.
Unlike the desert variety, which has bright pink flowers, the dunes version’s flowers were white with just a hint of pale pink in the throat. Whereas the desert species had flowers on the end of a solitary branch, the sand dune variety had multiple stems branching out from the stalk.
She wrote an article about her find and brought a copy of it to Philip Munz, a well-known botanist who was about to publish his book. She asked him to include Pholisma paniculatum, but he told her it was too late.
Several months later, she heard Munz speak at Descanso Gardens. He mentioned the plant, but did not acknowledge that it was different from the desert species. Templeton was devastated.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she recalls. “I went home and cried. I wanted to get up and tell the people the one in El Segundo is as different from the desert one as day and night. Since then, I always wished I had.”
Robert Gustafson, who recently retired as the museum’s collections manager in botany, said such disagreements are common among botanists: “You always have the lumpers and the splitters when it comes to a new species.”
But Templeton remains convinced that she found a new plant species, asserting that Munz may have agreed with her had she been a man.
In the ensuing years, the sand dunes--just south of Mines Field, the airfield that later became Los Angeles International Airport--underwent tremendous change. Developers turned the dunes into a residential area, with about 800 homes overlooking the ocean. To keep sand from blowing in the neighborhood, native plants were replaced with hearty ice plant. Vernal pools that had dotted the adjoining coastal prairie soon dried up.
The dawn of the jet age brought noise complaints from residents in the area, who lived directly under the flight path. Eventually, the city bought their land, cleared away the houses and fenced in the 300-acre area.
When city officials later decided to turn the property into a preserve for the endangered El Segundo blue butterfly, which is unique to the area, scientists began restoring 200 acres of the sand dune habitat. City officials plan to convert the remaining 100 acres into a recreational area to support the preserve.
Heading the restoration project, which is being funded with a $430,000 grant from the state Department of Transportation and a $75,000 grant from the Coastal Conservancy, is Rudolf H. T. Mattoni, who calls the dunes a “rich and unique habitat island in the middle of an urban sea.”
In 1985, Mattoni led a survey of all the remaining plants and animals on the dunes. At first, he thought Pholisma paniculatum, which Templeton had described as abundant in the 1938 survey, had long since become extinct. Then last year, his son, Adriano Mattoni, who works on the restoration project, stumbled across two specimens of the odd-looking plant while he was gathering seeds.
“At first, I thought it was a toadstool,” Adriano Mattoni said. “I looked over and thought, ‘That’s the most bizarre-looking plant I think I have ever seen.’ ”
Told about the discovery, his father later confirmed it was the same plant Templeton had documented in the earlier survey.
“We just gave up,” he said. “We thought it was long gone.”
Three weeks ago, Mattoni asked Andrew C. Sanders, curator of the Herbarium at UC Riverside, to research whether the plant is in fact a separate species and unique to the El Segundo sand dunes.
Sanders, who said it will be months before his research is complete, doubts that the plant, although rare, is unique to the dunes. But, he said, he is inclined to describe it as a distinct species.
“The thing immediately struck me as likely different (from the desert variety),” Sanders said. “If we find a suite of characteristics, four to six differences . . . and no integration between (coastal and desert varieties), then I’m inclined to treat it as a species.”
That is welcome news to Templeton, who came with her husband to the dunes last week to see the resurgent flower. Careful not to disturb nascent plant shrubs in her path, she beat a surprisingly quick path with her walker down the face of a dune to the mound where Mattoni spotted the plant.
“Oh yeah, oh I see it,” Templeton said excitedly, pointing to the tiny clump of white flowers. “You can hardly see it unless you know what you’re looking for.”
She bent over to photograph the specimens with her camera, and then gazed at the nearby airport runway.
“I was so afraid it would have disappeared because they were bulldozing the area,” Templeton said. “When I got that call saying they found it again, I was in heaven. I thought, ‘Oh, they’re still alive! They weren’t destroyed!’ It’s such a thrill for me, I don’t even have words for it.”
Rare Plant
The reappearance of a rare flower in the El Sequndo sand dune preserve has excited local conservationists and drawn attention to its discover-a Glendale botanist who once worked for the county Museum of Natural History. Name: Pholisma paniculatum Identified: In 1932, by botanist Bonnie Templeton of Glassell Park Habitat: Coastal dunes Features: Cauliflower-like head of tiny white flowers that appear on surface of sand atop an underground network of thick stalks that grow on the roots of host plants.
Only in El Sequndo
Though the jury is still out on Pholisma paniculatum, several species of plants and animals are unique to the El Sequndo dunes. Among them are: El Sequndo blue butterfly El Sequndo spineflower El Sequndo goat moth El Sequndo Jerusalem cricket El Sequndo crab spider
