Past

Ron: I grew up in a small old wooden house in Inglewood in a time before cell phones, laptops, and YouTube. My entertainment was my backyard, but particularly the bugs and critters that I could find there. I would spend entire days searching, watching, and trying to understand anything that was alive. The garden wasn’t large and it wasn’t manicured, but it had lots of rocks and branches and leaf piles – perfect for exploring.

That garden was also where I learned about ecology, even though I didn’t know that term yet; it was just dirt and bugs and leaves and sticks and rocks. Beside the bugs, some of my earliest memories–age three or four, were planting bare root strawberries with my dad, watering them, checking them every day, and eventually picking and eating the sweet red berries. I also remember a few thorny roses, lots of weeds, my rambunctious beagle, and–on the edge of the grassy patch we called a lawn–an ancient weeping willow.

Although it was fun to climb, that willow tree tormented me through most of my early years. For a decade or more, it seemed that my reason for existence was to rake up and dispose of the hundred thousand leaves that would rain down on the lawn and the dirt patch below it–every week, again and again and again. I still don’t like big willows or lawns and I’m pretty sure why.

But that same willow also taught me valuable lessons. It hosted hundreds of mourning cloak butterfly caterpillars every year, as well as migratory warblers, fence lizards, a constant stream of ants, and lots of other interesting curiosities. I learned about seasons, plant and insect interactions, composting, soil, photosynthesis, environmental cooling, and twenty other lessons from that messy willow tree. 

In time, I ventured from my backyard into the neighborhood and nearby woodlot. Later, after we moved to Orange County, my classrooms expanded to Huntington Beach, Silverado Canyon, Bolsa Chica, and any leafy hillside. I collected and learned the names of every insect I could find, contributing to some science, and I did a little writing. I learned all the lizards, spiders, and plants along the way. Then birds got my attention, and I travelled to Florida, Alaska, Canada, Arizona, Texas–and of course all over Southern California–building my lists.  

Meanwhile, back home, I began propagating everything I could in my homemade backyard lath house. Plants seemed to transcend every part of my outdoor world, and I read every plant book (usually three times), and joined every garden and plant club I could find. I was hooked.

Q: Do you have any native plant mentors?

Ron: Too many to name, and they are all people our members will know. Dan Songster got me involved in CNPS and I will always be grateful to him. My visit to Sarah Jayne’s garden during a chapter garden tour got me hooked on native horticulture. But out in the field, where I am happiest, I owe so much to my mentors–people like Bob Allen, Fred Roberts, and Michael Simpson. Not only are they outstanding botanists, they are great people and great teachers. Their shadow is immense.

Present

Q: What is a favorite native plant activity?

Ron: So many people seem to just pass through nature and don’t take the time needed to really understand its magic and what is happening all around them. I love to stop along a trail, a ridge, a stream, or a marsh with another person or a small group and just sit down, notice, and talk about what is within arm’s reach. I guess that wonder and fascination still lingers from my childhood. 

The stories that can be told and shared just in those few feet about the soil, plants, fungi, insects, rocks, climate, moisture, sunlight are incredible. Walk a few more feet, sit down again—and there are all new stories to be told, learned and re-learned. I love sharing a few of those stories with inquisitive minds, young or old, and seeing someone’s eyes light up and their minds open up. It’s magical, really magical, to share the details of nature with other people, and I want to do it until my last breath.

Q:  What aspect of native plants do you like to focus on?

Ron: I suppose you might call it floristics. Floristics is the study of plants and plant groups in a specific geographic area. It deals with all the plant taxa in that area, whether widespread, restricted, common, rare, native, or naturalized. 

By understanding the floristics of Orange County, we can better understand the associated environmental variables, such as soil, temperature, slope and aspect, rainfall, plant associates, insect relationships, microbial ecology, and much more. High quality floristic work is used by every land manager, conservationist, biologist, and thousands of everyday enthusiasts. 

With today’s incredible identification and reporting tools and accessible technology, this is something that every CNPS member can access and contribute to in very meaningful ways.

One branch of floristics that overlaps with conservation is the issue of invasive plants. Some conservation threats are very apparent: a new housing tract, a road widening, the removal of an old oak, or the trampling of a field of wildflowers. For years I have been focusing my work on another major threat that is not quite as visual, emotional, or easy to see and understand: invasive species.

Other than direct habitat loss, the impacts from invasive plants are the largest cause of species extinction and loss of biodiversity. However, invasive plants are a death-by-a-thousand-cuts, and it is hard for folks to see it happening. Remove an old oak tree during a road widening project and a hundred people will show up to protest. But draw attention to a new invasive weed settling in on a Laguna Beach hillside, and then ask for the tools and resources to eradicate it, and the message falls on deaf ears.

Q: Besides your work with invasive species, what other plant projects are you working on right now?

Ron: I like to be working on a lot of projects at the same time. I enjoy documenting the plants growing wild in Southern California, what they are, where they are, how many there are, and how they are faring. I’ve recorded and documented for the public record around 1,700 unique wild plant taxa in Orange County, but there are still a handful I have not seen and not documented, and those are my objectives. Over the past several years I have especially focused on the two extremes of our wildland plants: the rare plants and the invasive plants.

With help from Rebecca Crowe, Mike Simpson, Fred Roberts, Bob Allen, and others, we are producing thorough and highly accurate Vascular Plant Checklists for each of our county wilderness parks. This is slow, tedious, and time consuming work, but ultimately it will produce a tremendous scientific resource for future conservation and research efforts. We are already working on our third park, with good support from several Orange County chapter members as well.

Q: Do you have any native plants in your yard?

Ron: My yard is mostly natives but includes a vegetable garden as well as a collection of weird, collectable, and rare plants that most folks wouldn’t understand, but they are all part of my obsession.  

FUTURE

Q: What are your goals for our chapter and/or the California native plant community at large?

Ron: I would like our chapter to be the leading environmental and conservation organization in Orange County. I want OCCNPS to be seen, not as a specialty organization, but as the most important natural history organization in the county. I see our membership growing to two or three thousand and having a strong influence in land planning decisions. Our expertise can extend into the classrooms of Orange County, and our leadership can help people reimagine their gardens and landscapes. OCCNPS can be a strong legal and regulatory influence as well as the organization that helps people be a positive influence on the planet and the community. And I want OCCNPS to be a place where anyone and everyone feels welcome, regardless of income, lifestyle, religion, age, disability, or race. Nature is indifferent to all that.

In the big picture, because plants—specifically locally native plants—are the basis of all biodiversity, we need to do everything we can to know what they are, where they are, how many there are, and how they intersect with their local ecology . . . we need to protect and conserve them.  Our chapter can work to engage its membership more, whether it be through gardening, documenting, protecting, teaching, or researching—anything to get more people out interacting with our native plants.

Q: How do native plants have far-reaching future consequences?

Ron: Plants are the foundation of all life on earth, but this is often overlooked. Plants (including some algae) are the organisms that feed everything else on the planet. Everything on earth eats a plant, or eats something that eats a plant. Think about that for a moment. Meanwhile, plants eat nothing else—they have this unique ability to take in sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide and make their own food. If we don’t conserve the biodiversity of plants on this planet, no other conservation will much matter. It starts with plants. Plants feed everything.

Q: What OCCNPS activities would you like to encourage others to try?

Ron: Field trips might be my favorite part of the chapter. I encourage everyone to spend time in the field with a really good teacher who can explain what you are seeing. When one learns the secrets of why a plant grows in one place but not another, its special survival and reproduction strategies, its animal and pollinator interactions, its relationships to soil and microbes, moisture, temperature, fire, and so on, then one begins to not just “see” the plant, but to understand it. 

Surround yourself with the smartest people you can, go for a walk with them, ask them questions, and listen, especially listen. I love field trips .  .  . a wild place in nature with a really good teacher is the best classroom.

Q: What is one thing you have learned about native plants that you didn’t know when you started this journey?

Ron: I started in horticulture and still have at least one foot very deep in that world. Early on, however, I didn’t fully understand the significance of a locally native plant in a garden versus any other plant from any other part of the planet.

That has all changed and I now see the urban forest as our next great environmental frontier. What if we could blur the distinction between wildlands and gardens? What if we could get homeowners, and then HOA’s, and then whole communities to incorporate a diversity of locally native species into their gardens and landscapes? 

We can. 

Eventually, these little pockets of native plant habitat would connect to one another, and the associated insects and wildlife would follow. Whole cities would become not only places for people, but also places for biological diversity as well, with all the benefits that come with that. That’s my professional goal, and I’m working at it. 

Q: Final thoughts?

Ron: For most people, in our increasingly urban world, gardens are the windows to nature. Almost all the great naturalists, and probably most people reading this, will trace their earliest memories about nature to a garden. 

Muir, Thoreau, Wilson, Linnaeus, Darwin, Abbey, Leopold, and Audubon all trace their beginnings to simple early experiences in a garden. Gardens are where we begin to learn how the natural world works. We need gardens, especially the right gardens, to continue opening that window to the natural world and helping the next generation begin that journey of discovery and understanding.