Point Reyes Light - May 10, 2001
Coyote bush defended
By Judith Lowry
Bolinas
Poor Friends of the Coyote Bush. After 10 years of obscurity, we are back in the limelight, only to be maligned once again as being "well-intentioned." Apparently, we have had an impact out of all proportion to our activities.
This organization was formed at a time when the spread of exotics and the importance of our native plants as habitat was hardly a blip on the screen. Our stated goal was "the preservation and restoration of the local flora of the Bolinas Mesa." We chose coyote bush as an example of an important native species that plays a critical and little understood role yet was frequently removed unthinkingly.
Its role is reminiscent of the role of mesquite in the Southwest, where old-grove mesquite bosques are increasingly rare critical habitat, but where mesquite is also an invader of grasslands devoid of livestock or fire.
Different varieties of coyote bush
Like coyote bush, it is both these things, and many more besides. Coyote bush functions differently according to soil, aspect, slope, distance from the coast, and land-use history. Inland it is an entirely different place holder, it even looks different.
Coyote bush isn’t "an environmental disaster"; nor is it all that we should have. It is one component of a complex riddle. Baccharis at Steep Ravine, Green Gulch, or Muir Beach is part of a rich coastal scrub plant community, which includes California sagebrush, lizardtail, sticky monkeyflower, yerba buena, sword fern, and checkerbloom. In other places, it can be successional to mixed evergreen woodlands. Coyote bush in Point Reyes and coyote bush in Muir Woods teach the great untaught lesson of site-specificity, every place unique.
At the Larner Seeds Demonstration Garden, coyote bush makes the bones of our garden, its cloud-like form and bright green leaves unifying the plantings. It is part of our native hedges, a nurse plant for degraded soil, a support for rose bushes. Amenable to pruning, it creates good opportunities for horticultural play. Walking by the coyote bush islands, you hear a satisfying rustling, which could be quail, lizards, garter snakes, deer, or wren-tits. Native bunch grasses grow greener around coyote bush.
Coyote bush just part of ecosystem
All this doesn’t mean that we only want coyote bush, but just that it should be part of the deal, for its ability to hold eroding cliffs, nesting and feeding opportunities for resident and migratory birds, and for the numerous insects that it feeds in the fall, when not much else is blooming.
We simulate the grassy openings maintained through burning by our indigenous predecessors, by sequentially hard-pruning coyote bush and fostering all the local wildflowers and grasses we can cram in. You will not find many of them at the Wilkins Ranch, where a once beautiful stretch of native bunchgrasses and wildflowers was opened to invasion by a burn that was not monitored.
We are all wallowing in ignorance. Even our "well-intentioned" editor. Coyote bush is many things to many people, but as a friend once said, I no longer perceive it as just coyote bush.
Editor’s note: The guest columnist is responding to the Sparsely Sage and Timely column in the April 19 issue. That column can also be found on The Light’s website, <www.ptreyeslight.com./columns/sparsely/sparsely0419_10>.