His Dream Is for a Return of the Natives
Steve Hartman sees beauty in plants most of us never notice.
The Reseda businessman is on a mission to replace nonnatives in the Sepulveda Dam Wildlife Reserve with plants that have grown there for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Big, splashy plants produced by the horticultural hybridization machine don’t mesmerize Hartman the way they do seed-catalog junkies.
Hartman likes plants such as mule fat--a bushy member of the aster family that has sprung up all over the 225-acre wilderness area.
Like experimental film, mule fat is an acquired enthusiasm, and its name obviously doesn’t help. But during a recent walk through the 60-acre refuge north of Burbank Boulevard, Hartman looks upon a naturally occurring hedge of the unlovely bush with almost parental fondness.
“It blooms all year long,” Hartman says, pointing to its small, dirty-white flowers.
Hartman also likes coyote bush. Another member of the aster family, like the daisy, coyote bush bears white blossoms that have genuine aesthetic appeal, even for people whose hearts don’t leap up at the sight of mule fat.
“It’s like snow,” Hartman says with a fond smile.
Sepulveda Dam Wildlife Reserve is an artificial Eden within earshot of the San Diego and Ventura freeways. Here you can sit quietly by the man-made lake and see not just ducks and shorebirds but flickers, horned larks, blue grosbeaks, hummingbirds and hawks.
Hartman says 6 million gallons of treated water flow into the lake each day from the nearby Tillman sewage treatment plant, and living things love the nutrient-rich soup.
According to Muriel Kotin of the San Fernando Valley Audubon Society, more than 200 bird species have been identified in the area. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a snow-white great egret move at a regal pace through this oasis only 20 yards from the growl of traffic.
“They eat gophers,” Hartman says of the herons, a fact tastefully omitted from the area’s informational signs.
Birds are high on the list of living things people want to save. Gangly, grayish indigenous plants are not. But Hartman is proud of what he and other members of the California Native Plant Society have accomplished in the name of preservation.
With the help of volunteers and licensed plant exterminators, they have undertaken the painstaking task of ridding the reserve of such botanical interlopers as fennel and poison hemlock. And they are making progress, keeping the exotics at bay, if not actually eliminating them.
Volunteers and city employees pull out such unwanted imports by hand so the natives can spread and flourish.
“The main thing is to get the outliers,” says Hartman, who explains that early intervention saves money in the long run.
Like the imported eucalyptus, fennel and poison hemlock are tenacious and relentless, just the way nature made them. And keeping them contained, Hartman admits, is not just a battle, it’s a war.
Hartman has a long list of nonnative plants he’d like to see expelled from this small paradise--milk thistle, castor bean, giant reed grass, horehound and Shamel ash.
The last, he explains, is a “street tree,” a hardy, fast-growing import that was once the favored species for planting along local streets. The Shamel ash turned out to be one of those imported species, like the starling, that seemed to solve an ecological problem, only to create a host of new ones.
“It breaks sidewalks and invades riparian areas,” explains Hartman, who with his colleagues has persuaded the city to plant native ash and other indigenous trees whenever possible.
However successful he and his cohorts are, Hartman recognizes that the wildlife area is one that has been manipulated by humans. It will never be a true reflection of the wilderness of eons ago.
Plants are a filter through which Hartman views the world. He points out that mustard, present throughout Southern California, is a memento of its founding missionaries: “The Spanish friars brought the mustard seed and sprinkled it along their route so they could find their way. So it’s all along Ventura Boulevard.”
Hartman doesn’t rail against backyard gardens planted with hybrid roses or other nonnative, but he does think many native plants are beautiful in their own quiet way. One section of the reserve is called Hummingbird Hill, and it has been planted with some of the most attractive native species, including golden current, California lilac and several varieties of sage.
“It’s not all cactus,” Hartman points out.
While the California wild rose will never capture public hearts, minds and pocketbooks as the blue whale has, Hartman believes more people would volunteer to pull unwanted plants at the reserve if they knew they were needed.
After all, he says, gardening is the most popular hobby in America.
“I think there are a lot of people in apartments who would like to call a piece of land their own, even if it’s public land,” he says.
Hartman gazes at the refuge and imagines what it will look like 50 years from now, when the acorn woodpeckers may have returned.
“Some day we might have California quail, and if we’re really lucky, we’ll have vermilion flycatchers.”
And native plants will be the foundation of that happy day.
“Without the plants, there’s no habitat for the animals,” Hartman warns. “If you protect the plants, you protect everything else.”
