Two small hikes in one day
This weekend, we had to take a trip back to the west side of LA to check on our apartment and do some local chores back in the part of town where we usually live. This meant I was driving around town and stopping a lot - and I had some dead time in the day when my husband had to go handle a chore without me.
So I used that time to go on tiny hikes. One cool thing about LA is that if you're in west or east LA, or in the area around the Verdugos, getting to a hillside with plants on it is surprisingly easy!!
I did a short hike on Baldwin Hill, which I've written about before. This place is totally packed on the weekend - there's hundreds of people here at any given time, it feels like, and three food trucks on the road below the park selling "protein smoothies." My lunch was a coffee and peanut butter smoothie.
I was looking for spring wildflowers I haven't seen before. I've only been trying to "get good" at wildflower identification for a few years, and last year I spent all spring completely flat on my back, ill with three separate respiratory illnesses (a fourth hit me in the early summer??) and didn't get to go hiking anywhere at all. So some of these were brand new to me. You're probably aware that flowers are extremely seasonal... but when you start going out into uncultivated land, where you don't know what's hiding in the dirt around you, that seasonality can be really surprising. The landscape can look completely different from week to week depending on how much rain has fallen and whether you're standing near a big puddle or not. It's crazy.
On Baldwin Hill, I found some Miner's Lettuce, which is pretty crazy looking - like some kind of dry land lilypad - particularly when it pops up in the middle of a field of more common stuff like Bermuda Buttercup:
Then I drove across town, ended up in Burbank, and checked out Wildwood Canyon Park, a park with hiking trails just north of Burbank in the Verdugos.
The funny thing is that there are actually two Wildwood Canyon Parks in the LA area, and not even that far away from one another. Wildwood Canyon state park is located in Yucaipa, a place in San Bernardino County where I've never been. There's also a locale called "Wildwood" (is it a town? Did it used to be? I have no idea) in the San Gabriels not too far away from the Wildwood I visited in Burbank. Really weird shit.
Anyway, the Wildwood I visited in Burbank has a very short hiking trail with a lot of verticality in and out of a canyon, which I figured would be very cool for finding plants I haven't seen before.
I didn't end up doing the whole two mile loop - I hadn't brought enough water, my shoes were bad, and I was starting to feel really sunbaked. But taking the shorter loop put me down in the bottom of the canyon, which had a completely different, much colder climate and a totally different set of flowers I wouldn't have otherwise seen. So it worked out for the best!
I saw "Wild Canterbury Bells," a type of phacelia which was new to me:
I also saw some Redstem Stork's-Bill.. again, a variant of a plant category (storksbills) which I've seen a lot of recently, but hadn't seen this type:
Storksbills actually grow very thickly in lawns in the park of San Gabriel where I'm currently living. It's usually "Musk's Stork's-bill." Some locals have mowed the carpet of little green plants down, but other people seem to be using it as a kind of lawn, which is really cool:
Back in Wildwood Canyon, I saw a ton of "man-roots," which are a type of wild climbing gourd vine that I'd heard about before but never seen. The ones I found were probably Chilicothe. They had little white flowers and were growing on everything, including in some of the treetops:
The hill was covered in a small plant I'm pretty sure is "Wishbone Bush," but nobody's been able to confirm this for me yet. There were tons of these little purple flowers about to come out everywhere, and here and there I was able to find a proper bloom:
I went down into the canyon at the halfway point of the climb using a side path. I really cannot recommend using this path if you go there, because it's partially collapsed from the recent rain. There are clearly people coming this way, because there's footprints in the loose dirt... but I can't really recommend navigating it, and I would have turned back if I'd had any water left to help me finish the hilltop route.
Down in the canyon, I found a plant that I am fairly certain is Greenspot Nightshade. It's just a boring leafy plant with teeny tiny flowers, but I hadn't seen these flowers before:
This plant wasn't flowering, but it's classified as "vulnerable" and I haven't seen it before, so it was exciting to find: These are stems of some kind of "Matilija Poppies", or "tree poppies" - they look crazy when they're flowering, so I may try to come back and find some later.
I found some other stuff that I was unable to identify, too. I won't post it here yet because I am still attempting to solve that ID puzzle.
Anyway, if you are in southern California, now is an extremely good time to go outdoors. There's lots of weird little plants out there right now which will look completely different in another couple of months. And the temperature is great!!