An Ugly Stick’s Day in the Sun : After 9 Months in a Heap, Giant Plant Rises to Shine

Even plant-loving botanists admit that the giant coreopsis spends most of its life looking decidedly ugly.

Nine months out of the year, the native shrub appears lifeless and bedraggled, like a neglected houseplant in a bachelor pad. It slumps in deflated piles all over the coastline of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Channel Islands. Some compare the thick trunk to the hairy foot of an elephant or the thick foliage to a dirty old mop.

“It looks like a broken-down stick,” said Milt McAuley, author of a book on the wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains. “It looks terrible when it’s dormant. But it looks terrific at this time of year.”

Every March, the giant coreopsis undergoes an incredible transformation, blossoming into a bright green shrub covered with yellow blossoms.

“It’s an ugly duckling story,” said Ken Low, a botanist with the National Park Service.

That story is unfolding with a vengeance right now, with the giant coreopsis taking over ocean-facing hillsides from Point Dume to Santa Barbara. The plant makes its home primarily in Ventura County, climbing over the Channel Islands, inching up the Conejo Grade and dominating Long Grade Canyon near Camarillo State Hospital.

Because the giant coreopsis is a native plant with a limited growing range, botanists place particular value on it. The state parks are co-sponsoring a restoration project at Point Dume aimed at saving the yellow flowers from the creeping ice plant.

“The ice plant will climb up on the coreopsis stalk and suffocate it,” said state parks employee Bill Maslach. “Our intent is to create a little island around the coreopsis.”

Botanists theorize that the plant requires the moisture of ocean fog to live. The colonies on the Conejo Grade and Long Grade Canyon are unusually far inland, but probably thrive on the cool fogs that often shroud the mountains, said Rick Burgess, a member of the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society.

Because the giant coreopsis grow so densely on the Channel Islands, the island chapter of the plant society features the flowering shrub as its emblem on T-shirts and literature. And Burgess is so attached to the giant coreopsis that he planted some in the yard of his Oxnard home. But after a few seasons, the shrub rotted out and toppled over.

“It’s not a terribly good choice for landscaping,” he said. “It’s very intriguing though. It looks like a Dr. Seuss plant.”

Legend--and botany books--have it that the giant coreopsis can reach 10 feet in height.

“I can’t say that I’ve seen one that big,” said Connie Rutherford, a botanist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

McAuley believes some of the giant coreopsis plants in the La Jolla Valley in Point Mugu State Park have indeed reached those heights. But the Greenmeadow fire in the fall of 1993 wiped out the whole valley, he said, and the giant coreopsis has yet to rebound completely.

“It will be a few more years before they are in their loaded stage,” he said.

The name coreopsis applies to a much larger genus of flowers, with 114 species worldwide, growing mostly in the Americas and Africa. In California, there are nine species of coreopsis. The name means bug-like, which probably relates to the appearance of the seeds, McAuley says.

Giant coreopsis are sometimes called sea dahlias, because the yellow flowers look like dahlias. The flowers can be as much as 3 inches across and a brilliant yellow.

Despite its beauty and its uniqueness to this region, the giant coreopsis is frequently overlooked, botanists said. Many summertime hikers assume the wilted plant is dead and breeze by it without so much as a second glance. And during its spring bloom, which lasts through April and into May, the giant coreopsis gets lumped in with all those other yellow flowers out there; the ones park rangers call DYC, or Damn Yellow Composites.

But the plant has its devoted admirers.

“I think it is one of the most beautiful yellow flowers there is,” raved Maslach. “I think it should be the county flower of Ventura.”