With guidance from naturalist Mike Kelly of the Friends of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, teacher Blake Kern's Oceanside Home Education class explored plants native to Southern California, USA.
Plants are very important to us. Some provide food for us and even for many animals. Other plants can be used for medicines, and for keeping the air clean.
One plant that is on the endangered list is the Fairy Duster. Its scientific name is Calliandra eriophylla. This plant is native to San Diego and Imperial counties of California, southern Arizona, western Texas, and northern Mexico.
The flowers on the Fairy Duster are very delicate. They look like reddish, purple-pink, rose-colored puff balls that have numerous dark red stamens one-inch long. It has thick dark branches. If you look at the blue-green leaves from far away, they look like one whole leaf but they really consist of 5-15 pairs of leaflets. This plant can grow to three feet in height and four feet in width. The purple-pink-rose colored puff flower is in bloom late winter through fall.
The Fairy Duster can be planted in a sunny or partly sunny spot. This plant does well in winter. It can survive in temperatures as low as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. These plants like to be in fast draining sandy soil and are drought resistant. The Fairy Duster takes awhile to grow from a small plant, but once it starts, it grows to become a beautiful shrub.
Rabbits and squirrels like to eat it. So we need to protect it from these animals. It was hard for us to find information about the Fairy Duster. This plant is not a very common plant to find in San Diego County. The Fairy Duster is a really nice, beautiful plant so my sisters and I would really like to see it come off the endangered list.
by Jacklyn, Jeanelle and Jennifer Sandoval
The Jewelflower -- Family: Brassicaceae (Mustard) -- is a dicot annual herb. The seeds of the Jewelflower usually germinate in the fall or during the rainy seasons. Once the plant starts to bud its gland-shaped flowers, it starts to gain height, sometimes reaching more than two whole feet. The average size of the Jewelflower is somewhere between 10 cm. and 50 cm.
The Jewelflower is a perfectly assembled piece of natural beauty. Its stem is almost perfectly vertical, and its small leaves which grow directly out of the very lowest part of the stem are perfectly symmetrical. The buds or flowers of the Jewelflower grow straight out and hang down from the stem, the flowers all grow out of the same side of the stem forming a kind of perfect line down the stem. This is true of most species of Jewelflower. Most of the Jewelflower species are slowly declining in numbers, and are considered "Species of Concern" by the government. So, Jewelflowers are rare, though some may be more rare than others, like the Mount Hamilton Jewelflower which is extremely rare.
The Slenderpod Jewelflower is native to California. It comes more directly from Southern California, but is not confined to the one state. There may be some rare species in northern California. This plant is fairly rare, and is currently under observation and suspicion of being threatened by continual loss of habitat through construction. The Slenderpod Jewelflower can be found in most wildlife preserves in San Diego County, Imperial County, Santa Clara, Orange County, Central Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura. Additional recorded sightings of the plant include: Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo.
by David Eads
There are about forty-three species of the Manzanita Arctostaphlos plants that the early settlers and Indians used for food and drink. The Indians would eat the berries fresh from the plant. The Spanish settlers would gather the berries green and smash them to make a juice and also a jelly.
The Indians usually collected only ripe fruit, beating them into baskets just like grass seeds they collected. They would let them dry along with the pulp from the plant. Then they would pound it down to make it into a fine powder. By just adding water and letting it sit for a few hours, it would turn into a apple-like cider. Another use of this powder was for making a kind of mush-cake. The Indians would also store this powder for winter food and drink.
The Indians made medicine from the Manzanita. A lotion was produced to treat poison oak and colds. We have learned from early settlers and Indians how to make food, drink and medicines from a beautiful plant.
by Timothy McDonald and Paul McDonald
© 1997 The Special Species Project ®
