Time Is Short for Old Man and the Seeds

How dull it is to pause, to make and end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

--”Ulysses”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The old man and his young friend barrel along Mulholland Highway in a new Subaru. The road is nearly empty at mid-morning and Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 in B minor plays softly on the radio. As the younger man drives, his head swings side to side like a metronome, scanning the green hills for a flash of purple, white or yellow.

“Slow down, slow down,” Ed Peterson tells him. “You see more that way.”

For a few months every spring, California’s evanescent wildflowers burst into being in the deserts, hills and cliffs around Los Angeles. They are born, blossom and die in a sliver of time. The same cannot be said of Peterson.

At 93, Peterson is one of the foremost local experts on Southern California wildflowers. He can identify hundreds of species on sight, by both their common and Latin names. He knows back country spots in the Antelope Valley where California poppies bloom in carpets. And he’s hiked the Santa Monica Mountains often enough to predict the appearance of a clump of purple lupine around a particular bend in the road.

But his true expertise lies in seeds.

For 33 years, the Los Angeles native has volunteered to comb fields and roads in search of wildflower seeds for the Theodore Payne Foundation, a nonprofit Sun Valley group dedicated to preserving native plants.

In each of those years, Peterson has collected the next generation’s crop of wildflowers as the foundation’s primary seed gatherer. It’s a role that began with Payne himself, an English botanist whom Peterson met shortly before Payne’s death in 1963 at the age of 91.

Now, on this particular spring day, as the road hums by and the wildflowers bloom all around, Peterson is searching again for a next generation: his own successor, a link in a chain that stretches back to 19th century England.

He’s not tired of the job. Nor is his health a great concern. Peterson’s primary complaint is his vision. He is blind in one eye and the sight in the other is fading. And a gardener knows that all seasons come to an end.

“I intend to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can,” Peterson says. “But we need to find somebody else who is able to take the time to do this.”

*

Peterson has been a seedsman almost as long as he can remember.

He grew up in Hollywood near the intersection of Western and Franklin avenues, at a time when a merchant tailor like his father could buy a 75-by-200 foot lot there and support a family of six. As a boy, Peterson drifted to sleep to the sound of frogs and the sickly sweet smell of orange blossoms in the orchards nearby.

His first chore was watering the Shasta daisies that grew beside a walkway to the family’s home. He moved on to caring for the vegetables in the family garden. By the time he got out of Hollywood High School--his 75th reunion is this year, though he doubts enough alumni are left to celebrate--he was fixed on a career in plants.

After getting a degree in botany at UCLA, Peterson spent his working life as the landscape supervisor at Los Angeles City College. It was in 1959 that he met Payne, who immigrated to this country from England after being captivated as a child by an 1882 British botanical exhibit of California wildflowers. A few years later, Peterson began working for the Payne foundation.

Peterson is not a poet. When pressed to explain his fascination with plants, he stares for a moment at the space in front of him. His face is strangely delicate, the veins in his forehead showing blue-black through pale skin. His cheeks glow bright red. Though rheumy, his eyes shine icy blue.

Finally, he says simply that he has always been fascinated by the life of seeds. He talks about a co-worker who recently coaxed growth from seeds collected by Payne in 1918.

“Some seeds last only a few weeks. Other will last for a great many years,” he says. “They’re quite interesting.”

This day’s hunt begins about 9:30 a.m., when Jason Servatius rings the doorbell at Peterson’s modest Culver City home. Servatius is 23, ponytailed and newly degreed in sociology from the University of San Francisco.

During his studies, he became interested in the medicinal value of native plants and, through a friend, discovered the foundation, located on 23 acres in La Tuna Canyon.

He has worked there only a month and has no specific plans to act as Peterson’s heir, carrying the torch that Payne lighted in the 19th century into the 21st.

Still, he’s open to the idea. After all, what could be a better job?

“You get to be outside, hiking in the mountains and you can get paid for it,” Servatius says. “And I like the idea of doing something to help California and its flora.”

The two men head off for Pacific Coast Highway, then wind their way up to Mulholland, where Peterson has his thoughts on a particular stretch of road that has yielded a bounty of wildflower seeds in the past.

During the last few years, dry winters left a dearth of wildflowers. The foundation even had to cancel its annual wildflower tour. But this year’s El Nino storms have kept the ground damp much longer than usual, creating ideal conditions for growth.

Today’s mission is simply to scout. The flowers are blooming now. They’re easy to identify. The pair will come back in a few weeks in search of the seeds, which will be labeled, cleaned, then sold at the foundation.

It isn’t long before Servatius spots a clump of purple flowers on the side of the road. He pulls the car over, leaps out and runs up a nearby hill to take a closer look.

Peterson moves a little more slowly. He is wearing faded blue jeans, a cardigan sweater and a Kangol hat that was white long ago. With a wooden walking stick, he steadies himself as he moves toward Servatius through a field of knee-high weeds.

The two meet at a small creek bed running past the bottom of the hill and Servatius hands a flower to Peterson. He rolls it between his fingers, which are thick as cigars and wrapped with calluses and age spots.

“Is it paintbrush?” Servatius asks.

“No, no, that’s owl’s clover. Orthocarpus purpurascens,” Peterson says, letting the flower drop. It’s common enough, though he promises to return in a few weeks for some wild seed specimens.

The two drive on, at one point spotting a tall, whitish flower. It’s on a hill in an area burned during wildfires two years ago. This time, Peterson is excited. They are firehearts--wildflowers that can reproduce only after the seeds go through a baptism of fire. They are not often found.

“The point when you go out is to see things,” he says. “You don’t always find what you expect.”

As the morning wears on, the two wind past several patches of wildflowers. They pass rioting bunches of bright yellow canyon sunflower and Spanish broom, a nonnative. There is purple nightshade at one stop, prickly phlox at another. The car frequently lurches to the side of the road, then backs down the shoulder for a closer look at their discoveries.

The morning winds up on Stunt Road, a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop that has provided Peterson with plenty of seeds in the past. Peterson and Servatius both get out of the car and begin making their way up the gentle slope.

Servatius watches as Peterson makes his way slowly with the cane, leaning close to one group of wildflower, then another. At one especially small clump of white flowers, Peterson gets down on his hands and knees. His forearms tremble slightly as he leans close to bring the blooms to his face. Miners’ lettuce, he decides. Claytonia perfolita.

“That’s in full bloom. A nice little specimen there,” Peterson says.

The young man can only look on in admiration.

Says Servatius: “There is so much we have to get from him.”