A natural gas along the freeway

This is not a treacly plea to stop and smell the roses. For one thing, there aren’t any roses out here on the center divider of the Santa Monica Freeway. For another, it would be incredibly dangerous and we all have enough tsoris as it is.

But in case you are among the approximately 299,750 drivers who travel the stretch of Santa Monica Freeway between the 405 and the 110 each weekday and have been so taken by what Rush Limbaugh or Larry Mantle have to say that you failed to notice the joyful colonization of the median by all manner of flower and shrub, here is a little jab in the ribs:

In the most unlikely place, proof of our lush late spring has presented itself.

Amid the discarded plastic bags and other flotsam of the freeway corridor, it’s refreshing to spy the telltale yellow of a dandelion flower or a tree sapling that’s already 2 feet high. Somewhere east of Crenshaw, there’s a whole clump of daisies and an incipient stand of bamboo. Weird? Perhaps, but certainly no weirder than anything else you see on roadways these days: trucks with brass testicles hanging below their license plates, women risking blindness to apply mascara while driving, etc.

There is something delightful about whizzing down the freeway at 70 mph (or better yet, stuck at a bumper-to-bumper pace) and noticing that on a stretch of pavement not meant for carbon-based life forms, plants are reaching with tender green shoots toward the sky, scrawny little flowers are blooming and small stands of grasses are blowing about as if they were miniature Kansas cornfields.

The embankments, by contrast, which nestle the freeway between their banks, are planted and watered. And so you might expect to see the volunteer patch of brilliant orange and yellow nasturtiums that are currently lighting up the southern slope near the Arlington Avenue exit.

But you do not expect to see plants on the hostile median, right in the crack where the asphalt and the concrete “New Jersey median barriers” (that’s the technical term; they should just call them ugly) form a 90-degree angle. Not in a spot where there is no soil, almost no water and certainly a dearth of fresh air. (Special exception: the ubiquitous Mexican fan palms, the indestructible cockroach of Southern California freeway flora.)

Botanists, if not exactly agog, are somewhat enthusiastic. Caltrans, on the other hand, is slightly concerned.

Horticulturalist Katarina Eriksson passes this way each workday on her way from home in Santa Monica to her job as head gardener of the herb, Shakespeare and rose gardens at the Huntingon Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Clearly, she has more pressing plant problems to worry about than what’s growing on the freeway, but she played ball when a reporter called.

“From the plants’ point of view, they are surviving as best they can,” she said. “From man’s point of view, they block the drains and are breaking up the cement.” What’s going on, she said, is “a wonderful struggle for survival.... That those plants live on the freeway is amazing.”

The plants didn’t used to have any chance at all.

“We used to sterilize that route,” said Caltrans spokesman Dave White, who says his agency springs into action against egregious greenery only when driver safety is put at risk, which, at least for now, does not appear to be the case. The sterilants, incidentally, initially included really serious poisons and then not-quite-as-serious poisons -- “stuff you can buy at Home Depot,” he said, like Roundup.

But Caltrans doesn’t even use Roundup there anymore. (If you grew up around here, you will recall the truly noxious smell of weed killers, sprayed by wand-toting men with tanks of the carcinogenic stuff on their backs. Just the thought of it narrows the throat and burns the nostrils.)

These days, said White, the Santa Monica Freeway is a “no-spraying route.” Which is one reason why spring is visible now where it wasn’t before. For safety reasons, Caltrans does not mow down the median. You can’t put those orange-jacketed community service crews to work in the middle of traffic, said White. A shoulder closure is relatively easy, but the fast lane is, as he put it, “a whole different dynamic.”

If the lack of poison has given nature a reprieve, there are other, more mysterious forces at work as well.

“It’s a heavily traveled route,” said White. “There are gardening trucks with trees, birds flying over -- seeds come from lots of places.”

Eriksson pondered the question as well: “That freeway is old. Forty years ago, there were still a lot of agricultural trucks going back and forth. Maybe the grasses that you see are from the hay they carried for horses and have survived since then.”

She has not been surprised by any of the specimens that she’s seen so far on her daily commute since most of the plants are common enough. “I once thought I saw a marijuana plant in Eagle Rock on the 134,” said Eriksson, “but it was just a weed, some juvenile growth.”

Why there seem to be more plants on the median than usual this year is a mystery.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanical Garden senior biologist Jim Bauml said. Recent rains have probably helped, abetting the soil that washes or is blown by the wind into cracks in the pavement where shallow roots take hold.

Atmospheric disturbances might contribute, he added. “When there is a thunderstorm with lightning, the lighting precipitates nitrogen out of the air and converts it to a form that plants can use, like a fertilizer. That would add to the growth aside from the water.”

Soon the sun will beat harder and the rains will stop, and when that happens, it will be curtains for the Santa Monica Freeway’s accidental botanicals.

“When summer starts,” said White with no hint of regret in his voice, “they won’t survive.”