Spring’s bounty hunters

THE man striding purposefully up the trail above Agoura Hills could be Clint Eastwood, what with his sharp nose and squinting blue eyes. He even wields a sharp object menacingly as he scans the terrain.

But the lone figure in the wilderness is no high-plains drifter. He is amateur botanist David Ecklund, a 60-year-old Vietnam veteran, and his weapon of choice is a common garden hoe. The enemy: “invasive nonnative” plants that are crowding out native wildflowers.

Ecklund is one of thousands of flora fanatics who take to the hills from about March to June every year to identify, track, photograph and commune with the spring’s bounty. The pastime is part science, part treasure hunt and mostly outdoor exploration. And for many enthusiasts, it’s an excuse to connect with the most vivid examples of the planet’s natural beauty -- wildflowers.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s something positive,” says Jo Kitz, past president of the 700-member Los Angeles chapter of the California Native Plant Society. “I feel we have to get in contact with the earth.”

Such connections were wildly popular last spring, after a 100-year record rainfall incited a wildflower riot across Southern California. Blooms were practically sprouting from freeway potholes. If the earth laughs in flowers, as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, then last year the earth was in hysterics.

This year, however, has been tough on hard-core wildflower fans such as Ecklund. The drier-than-normal winter has left a bounty of seeds lying dormant through early spring.

A series of storms pummeled Southern California in late March but most seeds are holding out for a good dose of sunshine to germinate. (Some seeds can hit the snooze button for 10 to 15 years.)

On a scale of 1 to 10, one wildflower devotee rated this spring a minus-2.

Yet Ecklund and his fellow devotees continue to pound the dusty mountain and desert trails in search of those few isolated blossoms. They think nothing of hiking three or four miles to see a couple of scrawny lupine or verbena. And for what? To identify a plant by its family name, species and subspecies? The real pros can spell the multisyllabic Latin names.

But who are these flora fanatics? And what keeps them going even during lousy wildflower seasons?

They are not mild-mannered botany geeks. In Southern California, wildflower enthusiasts include a former prison guard with a passion for poppies, a retired German scientist with a fascination for the reproductive parts of a flowers and an aspiring musician who keeps track of what’s blooming in the Santa Monica Mountains.

And then, of course, there is Ecklund.

The warrior

Ecklund’s love affair with native plants began nearly 30 years ago, when he met a naturalist in Monterey who during hikes around Big Sur taught him about the connection between man and nature. Now Ecklund can rattle off the Latin names of hundreds of wildflowers -- and tell you which make a tasty snack. The wild hyacinth bulbs taste like walnuts, he says, and chia sage makes an excellent tea.

A former computer consultant, he manages a 2,000-acre parcel of public land for the Mountains Restoration Trust in Calabasas. As the trust’s caretaker, he clears trails, leads nature walks and lives in a 100-year-old shack with creaky wooden floors and drafty windows. Oh, and he likes it.

“All I need is a space heater and I’m fine,” he says of his aging home.

Being in the outdoors “reminds me that we are not the ultimate example of God’s great experiment,” he says.

But God’s great experiment has one great flaw, according to Ecklund. Invasive plants are overwhelming Southern California’s native species. Many alien species -- wild mustard, ripgut grass, redstem filaree, among others -- are not eaten by native insects and animals and thus enjoy an unfair advantage over local wildflowers.

Ecklund hopes to tilt the odds in the natives’ favor. During a recent hike above Agoura Hills, he swung his yellow garden hoe as if he were a lumberjack, leaving his uprooted victims to wilt on the dusty trail. But the hills were crowded with thriving nonnatives. What difference could one man with a hoe make? Even the real Clint Eastwood would admit defeat.

Not Ecklund. “One step forward and two steps back,” he says.

And he has no problem using herbicides to kill nonnative plants, even if it means destroying a few beloved wildflowers. “There’s always going to be civilian casualties, but this is war,” he says.

The go-to guy

While Ecklund champions wildflowers with a garden hoe, Tony Valois does it with the Internet.

It started two years ago, when Valois, a park volunteer at the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, suggested that the park create a website so wildflower enthusiasts could see what’s blooming.

Valois, 48, knew how to work a digital camera, so he offered to make it happen. After all, how difficult could it be to shoot some photos, write up a few sentences and upload it to the National Park Service website?

The result, the “What’s Blooming” website (www.nps.gov/samo/bloom), is a must-read for Southern California wildflower enthusiasts. The latest version is a 1,700-word composition detailing the sites of flowers throughout the 154,000-acre park, with 300 photos of everything from annual bedstraw to the woolly paintbrush.

“It has turned into a massive production,” says Valois, a former engineer and avid guitarist.

It’s not what Valois planned to do when he moved from Wisconsin four years ago after his wife landed a job with the park service. He had hoped to find music-related work, maybe teaching choir, and volunteer at the park on weekends. But the volunteer work has become a full-time gig. Now he plays rock and folk music at weddings and funerals in his spare time.

Valois has become the resident expert on tracking wildflowers in the Santa Monica Mountains. He learned the names of nearly 400 species the same way he learned chord progressions, by going over them again and again. When tourists ask to see a chocolate lily or a shooting star flower, Valois is the go-to guy.

During an afternoon hike above Little Sycamore Canyon in Ventura County, Valois pointed out yellow monkey flowers, Indian paintbrushes, yellow fiddleneck and evening primrose. “This is a plant that went crazy last year,” he says.

With his knowledge of flora, it would be no sweat to get a degree in botany. Why not put aside the guitar and get a job in botany?

Valois smiles at the thought and shakes his head.

“If I were a botanist, they would probably stick me in an office somewhere,” he says.

“I prefer being out here on the trail.”

The guardian

With his 6-foot-3 frame and resume as a former prison guard and probation camp director, Milt Stark doesn’t seem like the type to fall in love with a wildflower that is so delicate it closes its petals at the slightest cold breeze.

But in the Antelope Valley, there is no one more committed to defending the state’s official flower -- the California poppy -- than Stark.

In the 1960s, when he ran a youth probation camp in Lake Hughes, Stark began snapping photos of wildflowers when he and the probationers battled forest fires and cut fire breaks in the Angeles National Forest. In 1969, he bought a single-lens reflex camera, took a photography class and built a darkroom at his Lancaster home.

As probation camp director, Stark had a reputation as a disciplinarian because few fights occurred under his watch.

“But it wasn’t because I was so tough,” he says as he leaves the reserve on an overcast afternoon. “I worked with the kids. I formed a relationship with the kids and motivated them to do better.”

A member of a local wildflower preservation group saw Stark’s flower photos and recruited him to help the group lobby for a wildflower reserve. In 1976, the group persuaded the state to designate 1,800 acres of Antelope Buttes as the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve.

Soon, Stark’s hobby became a passion -- he learned the difference between poppies and goldfields, between lupine and fiddleneck. In 1990, Stark published the first of two wildflower guidebooks.

Ironically, he is having no luck growing California poppies in his home garden. So far, all that has come up are evening primroses.

During a recent walk through the poppy fields, he recounted the nearly 34 years he has dedicated to the poppies. Stark, now 84, leads the Poppy Reserve/Mojave Desert Interpretive Assn., a group that raises money for educational programs in and around the reserve.

Why spend so many years protecting one of the most common wildflowers in the state?

The grizzled old prison guard looks out from under his brown felt hat and says: “I guess it needed to be done.”

The scientist

Gabriele Rau is on her knees on a dirt trail, looking at a poppy in the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve in Murrieta. No, this is more than a look. It’s a physical examination.

She is peering at the pistil and stamen -- the reproductive organs of the tiny bloom -- through a botanical loupe, a magnifying lens similar to those used by jewelers.

Watching Rau peek at the flower’s inner parts could make some people feel embarrassed for the poppy. She says this is the only way to appreciate the magic of the pollination process.

“I think it’s fascinating,” Rau says in a thick German accent as she continues leading a wildflower hike through the reserve. “The variety, the color, the bounty ... “

This is what happens when a scientist gets hooked on wildflowers.

It’s not enough to enjoy the color and shape from a distance. Rau has to see how things work on a minute level.

Rau, 68, is a retired chemist who researched geothermal energy for Unocal.

She grew up in Berlin, where her only exposure to greenery was helping her mother in the garden. She moved to California in 1964.

After her marriage ended in divorce and her only daughter grew up, Rau began spending her extra time climbing mountains -- big mountains. In the last few years, she has scaled 100 peaks greater than 5,000 feet in elevation. The climbs are great, but Rau says she enjoys meeting the people and seeing the sights along the way, including the wildflowers that bloom along the trails.

Identifying wildflowers appeals to her scientific mind. There are more than 4,800 native species in California and a scientific method for identifying them. Rau first categorizes a flower by its family. Is it a lily? A sunflower? A mallow? A nightshade?

Once she targets the family name, she looks for clues -- the color and shape of the flower and leaves -- to the species and then more subtle clues to come up with the subspecies.

Some enthusiasts use field guides that list identifying clues, a process called “keying.” Rau rarely uses a book.

“That’s a checkerbloom,” she says, pointing to a small lavender flower as seven hikers follow close behind.

“That’s a Johnny jump-up,” she says, pointing out a yellow perennial.

She continues this way for nearly an hour, calling out flower names, with the group at her heels.

Then Rau sees a butterfly land on a flower.

“Oh, a blue butterfly,” she says.

What kind, someone asks.

“Oh, I can’t remember all the names. There are too many.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

What’s blooming:

The wildflower season has been delayed by a drier-than-normal winter but some wildflowers can nonetheless be found around Southern California.

What to see: California poppies, goldfields and pygmy lupine

Where: Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, 15101 Lancaster Road, Lancaster

Phone: (661) 724-1180

www.californiapoppies.com

What to see: Johnny jump-ups, shooting stars, wild hyacinth (blue dick)

Where: Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve, 39400 Clinton Keith Road, Murrieta

Phone: (951) 677-6951

www.santarosaplateau.org

What to see: Ceanothus, purple nightshade, monkey flower, morning glory

Where: Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area (Circle X Ranch). From Pacific Coast Highway, turn north onto Yerba Buena Road and go 5.4 miles.

Phone: (805) 370-2301

www.nps.gov/samo/bloom/

What to see: Popcorn flowers, twinning snapdragons, toadflax, fire poppies

Where: Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area (China Flat trail). Go to the end of Lindero Canyon Road in Agoura Hills.

Phone: (805) 370-2301

www.nps.gov/samo/bloom/

What to see: Mallow, blue-eyed grass, flannel bush, baby blue eyes

Where: Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden, 1500 N. College Ave., Claremont

Phone: (909) 625-8767

www.rsabg.org

For more on what’s blooming, call the Theodore Payne Foundation hotline: (818) 768-3533.