Singing the Praises of Mule Fat, Coyote Bush

Steve Hartman sees beauty in plants that most of us never notice.

The Reseda businessman is on a mission to replace nonnative species in the Sepulveda Dam Wildlife Reserve with plants that have grown there since before the locals had a written language.

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 looked upon a naturally occurring hedge of the unlovely bush with almost parental fondness.

“It blooms all year long,” Hartman said, 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 said.

The Sepulveda Dam Wildlife Reserve is an artificial Eden within earshot of the San Diego Freeway. Here you can sit quietly by the artificial lake and see not just ducks and shorebirds but also flickers, horned larks, blue grosbeaks, hummingbirds and hawks.

Hartman said 6 million gallons of treated water flow into the lake each day from the nearby Tillman sewage treatment plant. Living things love the nutrient-rich soup, Hartman said.

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 stately pace through this oasis only 20 yards from the growl of traffic.

“They eat gophers,” Hartman said of the herons.

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 plant 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 eliminating them.

Volunteers and city employees hand pull such unwanted imports so the natives can spread and flourish.

Like the imported eucalyptus, the fennel and poison hemlock are tenacious and relentless, just the way nature made them. And keeping them contained, Hartman said, is not just a battle, it’s a war.

Hartman has a long list of nonnative plants he would like to see expelled from this small paradise: milk thistle, castor bean, giant reed grass, horehound and Shamel ash.

Although Southern California plants are his passion, Hartman is no “plant Nazi,” as the botanical community sometimes calls those who would have the environment stripped of all but native species.

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.

And while the California wild rose will never capture public hearts, minds and pocketbooks as the California condor does, Hartman believes more people would volunteer to pull unwanted plants at the reserve if they knew they were needed.

“Without the plants, there’s no habitat for the animals,” Hartman said. “If you protect the plants, you protect everything else.”