“Fortunately, the task of preparing this volume has been carried on by those who have had the feeling that a piece of work must be done, but who also have had a purpose to make it reveal beauty and exude the historical atmosphere of the region with which it is concerned.”
—Santa Barbara: A Guide to the Channel City and Its Environs (1941)
Mustard blooming trailside in Los Padres National Forest, growing where we’ve never seen it before.
“Like other mustards, black mustard grows profusely and produces allelopathic chemicals that prevent germination of native plants. The spread of black mustard can increase the frequency of fires in chaparral and coastal sage scrub, changing these habitats to annual grassland.”
“. . .Whether introduced unknowingly by pioneers 200 years ago, or more recently by worldwide commerce and travel, the spread of invasive alien plants into State Park System lands is reaching crisis levels. . . .Without the natural enemies of their original habitats, invasive exotic species can spread rapidly and out-compete California native species, thereby upsetting natural ecosystem processes.
“Invasive exotic plants are one of the most serious threats to natural resources in national parks. They are able to reproduce in great numbers, rapidly colonize new areas, displace native species, and alter ecosystem processes across multiple scales.”
Where humans go, so too the mustard.
We’ve never seen so much mustard covering so many places all around the County of Santa Barbara, city and country.
The noxious weed spreads in remarkable, unnerving fashion.
Mustard recently covered our backyard, where it hadn’t been before.
We now wage an ongoing battle to merely keep it at bay, two years into the war, a vain attempt to eradicate the beastly weed altogether.
Complete removal seems impossible without constant vigilance and an exceptional amount of manual labor or resorting to chemical warfare, which we’re loath to do and have not done.
No Roundup glyphosate biocide for us.
Turn your back for a moment, it seems, and there sprouts or resprouts a new mustard bloom waving in the breeze like a mischievous hand saying hello, yet again.
And this is just in our yard, to say nothing of national forest, wilderness areas, and still other public lands.
Pacific sea fog filling Santa Ynez Valley amid the San Rafael and Santa Ynez Mountains basking in a Mediterranean Climate.
“571 plants have completely disappeared from the wild, more than twice the number of birds, mammals and amphibians combined
. . .
Most people can name a mammal or bird that has become extinct in recent centuries, but few can name an extinct plant
. . .
The scientists found the highest rates of plant extinction to be on islands, in the tropics and in areas with a Mediterranean climate – typical biodiverse regions which are home to many unique species vulnerable to human activities.
. . .
These results suggest that the increase in plant extinction rate could be due to the same factors that are documented as threats to many surviving plants: fragmentation and destruction of native vegetation resulting in the reduction or loss of habitat of many range-restricted species.”—Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Almost 600 plants have gone extinct in the last 250 years – Why should we care? (2019)
This year we’ve found the first ever few mustard shock troops sprouting and rearing up in the front yard.
We’re being overrun and overwhelmed right outside our front door.
Consider the problem at large across the state and the difficulty managing this menace.
The small individual flowers form on long stems, many at a time, each tiny bloom maturing rapidly, but sequentially, over a sustained period, the seeds dropping for weeks on end like paratroopers dropped deep into allied territory.
Seeds may last decades and still sprout, research shows. Dormant splinter cells awaiting activation.
Should the plant get a roothold growing into dense native soil, it becomes impossible to rip out, no matter how strong a person might be or how much force they can bring to bear.
This is not an exaggeration.
I’ve tried many times wrestling these weeds from hardpacked earth with both gloved hands tightly gripped around the stalk, yanking and pulling, teeth clenched, lips drawn, floundering around like a lunatic in the field, and failing miserably.
A fellow might be more apt to pull a sword from a stone than a mature mustard plant from the ground.
Should a person mow or weed whack the plant down to its crown at soil level, it rapidly regrows sending out yet more flower stems, like the flags of a victorious power holding ground in the face of an onslaught, leveraging its asymmetrical advantages.
To the brink of obsessive madness, the vile weed pushes me like the whale did Ahab.
The neighbors must be amused at the sight or maybe concerned.
Curvaceous beauty seen from Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, Kern County.
“It’s got to stop right now! Nip it. Nip it in the bud.”
“I say this calls for action and now. Nip it in the bud.”
“Now the minute it looks like there’s gonna be trouble. We got to nip it!
Nip! It! In! The! Bud!”
This cycle of nipping it in the bud plays out for months, the mustard continuing with insidious insistence to sprout new flower stem after new flower stem, ever shorter depending on rainfall, to tiny stems of a mere several inches long if need be, and still then throw a payload of seed.
All summer long we battle the mustard that sprouts from winter rains, and into the fall, until winter once more waters them again, giving them yet another renewed burst of growth.
The plant might reach higher than six feet if allowed, thick and woody and covering our yard as a dense forest.
If clipped numerous times but the tuberous root not fully removed, it rises to mere inches in height, yet still there and able to procreate.
Mustard boasts a remarkable biological comparative advantage relative most other native plants, or anything, really.
One must begrudgingly admit the vile weed performs its duty with impressive vigor and resilience.
Baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii), Figueroa Mountain
The mustard army is on an unstoppable march, long ago seeded in the state, and sapping ever further into the once fortified strongholds of native plants, conquering and colonizing new places, sprouting where we haven’t seen it before.
Clearing a pathway through native vegetation all too often invites encroachment by exotics.
We see mustard growing along forest roads and trails, which serve well as avenues of expansion to increase its range, a stowaway going wherever we go, on our vehicles, on our animals, on our shoes and clothing.
That is not intelligence by human standards, but it is indeed smartness on another level.
Something along the lines of what Michael Pollan wrote about 25 years ago in his book, Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World.
The plant appears to know what it wants and how to get there to get it and it succeeds wildly.
We see mustard growing along creeks and rivers in national forest lands and in designated wilderness areas, miles from roads and far off-trail, its yellow flowered stems waiving tauntingly in the breeze, Ahoy, yes, we’ve made it here, too! And thank you.
An insect-eaten calochortus kennedyi at elevation in Chumash Wilderness, representative of the traditional Japanese aesthetic, wabi-sabi (侘び寂び), where beauty is found in natural imperfection.
“Long-term management needs include improving:
1) Resilience of vegetation to wildfires and overall improvement of forest health by reducing fuels and reintroducing fire on the landscape using prescribed fire;
2) Community and infrastructure protection by reducing fuels adjacent to communities, Forest Service facilities, communication sites, roads, motorized trails, property boundaries, and strategic fuelbreaks; and
3) Wildfire containment opportunities by establishing and maintaining fuelbreaks, defense zones, and maintaining general forested areas in strategic locations.
—U.S. Forest Service, Los Padres National Forest
Ecological Restoration Project #62369 [later renamed: Wildfire Risk Reduction Project]
The Forest Service, as led by Christopher J. Stubbs, argued that ecological restoration and protection requires industrial-scale raking of forest detritus, removal of deadwood and logging, and the establishment of firebreaks.
Tellingly, they renamed their euphemistic plan from restoration to risk reduction; an apparent attempt to make it more palatable to a local public population that expressed deep skepticism and strong opposition in great numbers.
Preventative measures, they say, to reduce the chance of exceptionally hot burning, stand replacing wildfire sweeping the land clear of everything, including the largest and oldest iconic trees.
We do not advocate the protection of native plants over that of people, to be clear.
But questions arise based on common sense, informed by the common experiences of common folk and their simple observations in the field.
Will the Project #62369 plan for Pine Mountain in Ventura County invite invasive exotic weeds deeper into the forest to “spread rapidly and out-compete California native species, thereby upsetting natural ecosystem processes,” as California State Parks warns?
Will weeds “reproduce in great numbers, rapidly colonize new areas, displace native species, and alter ecosystem processes across multiple scales,” as National Parks warns?
Will the plan serve to “increase the frequency of fires in chaparral and coastal sage scrub,” as the California Native Plant Council warns can happen with black mustard.
Red penstemon, Pine Mountain
Little Miss E on Pine Mountain, Ventura County.
The opposing sides in the dispute over the plan each have their own chosen group of scientific scholars with their own published peer reviewed studies to lean on, as is often typical of such policy arguments.
We shall bear witness to the results, for better or worse.
A common refrain we hear from the Forest Service is that they’re understaffed and underfunded. We agree.
Yet, the federal government says they will somehow nevertheless properly manage and maintain what conditions they create as a direct result of their new firebreaks.
But the Forest Service appears to contradict itself in remarkable fashion in their own document, Ecological Restoration Project (Renamed Wildfire Risk Reduction Project) #62369.
Their word of promise provides little if any comfort.
This confusion undermines their credibility and calls into question their competence and true motives, as will be addressed in a future post on this weblog.
Moreover, from what we’ve seen in practice through decades in the field afoot, we don’t believe the United States Forest Service has it in them to maintain much of anything, let alone the new corridors of entry into the forest they’re opening up, through which invasive plants may vigorously spread.
Phacelia crenulata, Santa Ynez Riverbed
Post Script
John Hankins, over at the local Sierra Club chapter, has a brief in the latest Condor Call newsletter (April-May) listing alternative methods of weed removal.
They include: Pelargonic Acid, Vinegar (47%), Salt, Iron-based Herbicides, Corn Gluten Meal, Flame Weeding, Mulching and Soil Solarization, Essential Oils (Clove, Citric, Orange)
Mortar, benchmark, cupules.
In a previous post we wrote about a United States Geological Survey benchmark medal adhered to a Chumash mortar stone, adjacent the Santa Ynez Mountains along the southern-most edge of Santa Barbara County.
Here we call attention to another example of metaphor in metal and stone, adjacent the Sierra Madre Mountains along the northern-most edge of Santa Barbara County.
The benchmark is seated amid what appears to be a series of cupules. Perhaps a cupule itself was used as a small bowl and filled with adhesive mortar and the benchmark placed on top.
A much larger, more prominent bedrock outcrop rises from the grassland near the mortar stone, suggesting the medal was intentionally set upon the Indian artifact like a flag, for reasons other than need of a solid footing in a precise location.
USGS benchmark dated 1934, Cuyama Valley.
Related Post:
The sycamore sprout on the tree that refuses to give up.
For years I’ve watched from the window of my passing vehicle the historic sycamore stump adjacent Santa Barbara’s Old Mission resprout, and get whacked.
Every time the tree pops its head up somebody takes it off. This may have been going on for decades or maybe even 100 years, as will be explained below.
Last year or thereabouts the sprout stood waist high with a two inch-thick trunk forming.
Then WHACK! Off with its head.
The sprout had been surrounded in day-glow orange plastic mesh fencing at one point, which was then removed, along with the tree.
Apparently, the makeshift barrier was the work of interested town folk rather than a decided policy to protect and allow the tree to regrow.
I do not know, but it seemed that the sprout had been taken by groundskeepers for no reason other than to maintain a manicured look, when they came through removing annual weeds and grasses along the sidewalk.
Now ’tis the season for such weeding and the tree faces decapitation once more.
Oddly, just behind the sycamore, a volunteer ficus tree has sprouted in the cracks of the Old Mission’s sandstone wall, its roots wrapping and burrowing around and into the stone blocks.
At some point the ficus, a tree of beastly proportions when mature with gnarly, invasive roots that wrap like pythons around anything in the tree’s way, will fracture the wall and send it crumbling apart, thus destroying a historic feature.
Yet, the volunteer ficus has been left in place, while the historic sycamore tree keeps getting whacked for no apparent good reason.
Why?
Probably its mere simple unknowing negligence.
Shouldn’t the sycamore be allowed to grow once more?
If not, why not?
Postcard showing the Old Mission Sycamores (1893).
The tree sprout at issue is one of two sycamores, twins that once stood together, as seen in a postcard image from 1893, as iconic in stature naturally as the Old Mission is in architecture.
I do not know when the one tree was felled whose stump remains, but the tree is very much alive.
A brief one line entry in the book, Trees of Santa Barbara, by Katherine K. Muller, Richard E. Broder, and Will Beittel published in 1974 notably mentions only a single tree:
“A fine specimen on the northeast side of Old Mission Santa Barbara.”
Thus it stands to reason that the tree was chopped sometime long ago.
And although the sycamore may have lost its towering column of a body many decades ago, the tree remains alive.
A tree stump in general may remain alive for hundreds of years after being cut down, by being provided nutrients through an interconnection of roots with other surrounding trees and also through a symbiotic fungal network.
German silviculturist, Peter Wohlleben, in a stunning passage, opened our eyes to this fact in his book, The Hidden Life of Trees (2016).
Wohlleben was previously mentioned on this weblog in other posts:
The Intelligence of Coyote Tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata)
The Mighty Chanterelle and the Gnarly Oak
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Wohlleben tells an incredible story about discovering a stump in a forest he had for years thought was just a rock.
One day he leans in out of curiously, peels back the moss covering from the rock and finds that it is actually a beech stump.
Using a pocket knife he carefully scrapes away some bark and is shocked to find green cambium.
The stump was still alive. What’s more, he surmised that the tree had been felled some four to five hundred years ago!
Wohlleben from The Hidden Life of Trees:
“Living cells must have food in the form of sugar, they must breathe, and they must grow, at least a little. But without leaves—and therefore without photosynthesis—that’s impossible.
No being on our planet can maintain a centuries-long fast, not even the remains of a tree, and certainly not a stump that has had to survive on its own.
It was clear that something else was happening with this stump.
It must be getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots.
Scientists investigating similar situations have discovered that assistance may either be delivered remotely by fungal networks around the root tips—which facilitate nutrient exchange between trees—or the roots themselves may be interconnected.
In the case of the stump I had stumbled upon, I couldn’t find out what was going on, because I didn’t want to injure the old stump by digging around it, but one thing was clear; the surrounding beeches were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. That’s some heady stuff.
And so it appears that something of similar kind is going on with the Twin Sycamores of Old Mission Santa Barbara.
Don’t the sycamores deserve to be allowed to flourish together once more as is their want?
Shouldn’t they be protected?
Would the two together not enrich the scene?
Save our sycamore.
SOS
Yellow lupine on Pine Mountain, Los Padres National Forest, Ventura County (May 2025)
I came across the first quote below back in 2019 when reading M. Kat Anderson’s extraordinary book, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (2005).
I suspect most people have not seen this passage from Anderson before and that this may be the first time it’s ever been openly published online.
Surely, the quote from Trump is known by far more people, Kuyper’s known by far fewer, Anderson’s probably nearly unknown.
Certainly, tending forests by hand in yesteryears with simple tools and broadcast fire is far different than industrialized silviculture these days using mechanized means. I do not mean to conflate the two.
All three speak to the same issue using the same particular word.
Los Padres National Forest and wildlands in general are our preoccupation here.
Thus, the comments and the issue in general fall within the rubric of this weblog.
Take the comments for what ever they may be worth; edification or entertainment or agitation. Choose your own adventure.
“What’s that mean?”
“Read it anyway you like,” I said. . .
—Louis L’Amour, The Man From the Broken Hills (1975)
A view of pinyon pine forest in Chumash Wilderness, Pine Mountain in the distance defining the skyline. (June 2025)
“Aware that pinyon pines are not fire-resistant, Indians pruned back dead wood in the canopies and cut back low-lying limbs under the trees that could catch fire.
Tribes also raked litter and duff from under pine nut trees and removed by hand any live growing shrubs that might act as fuel ladders.
These practices protected the trees from the devastating effects of wildfires and, even more important, worked in conjunction with fires set intentionally.”
—M. Kat Anderson (2005), Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources
Anderson shares a personal communication related in 1989 by Virginia Jeff (Central Sierra Miwok), directly quoting Jeff: “They burned so they would not have big fires.”
Anderson paraphrases Jeff speaking of how her father in the 1920s “raked the debris from around the oaks” in preparation for “setting fires in the fall.”
“You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important.
You look at other countries where they do it differently and it’s a whole different story.
I was with the president of Finland and he called it a forest nation, and they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem.
And when they do, it’s a very small problem.”
—President Donald J. Trump (2018)
Trump Says California Can Learn From Finland On Fires. Is He Right?
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/world/europe/finland-california-wildfires-trump-raking.html
“This project exemplifies the misguided ‘rake-the-forest’ policy that began under the last Trump administration, and will only worsen over the next four years.”
—Jeff Kuyper (2024), Executive Director of Los Padres Forest Watch
Appeals Court Clears Path for Controversial Pine Mountain Logging Project
Related Post:
The Myth of Wilderness and Ethnocentrism: Race and Recognition in the Woods
J.D. Reyes served the length of his duty as a United States Forest Service ranger, from 1900 to 1931, in Santa Barbara National Forest, later renamed Los Padres several years after his retirement.
When his family first settled in the Upper Cuyama River Valley around 1854, they did so in what was at the time the County of Santa Barbara, as founded in 1850.
This area later fell within the bounds of Ventura County, as founded in 1873.
The following excerpts are sourced from, National Parks Service: A History of Mexican Americans in California; Cuyama Ranger District, Los Padres National Forest, Ventura County
* * *
“Jacinto Damien Reyes (or J. D., as he was affectionately known) deserves public recognition for his outstanding contributions to forest management and conservation in Ventura County.
During his 32-year tenure as a forest ranger in the Cuyama District of the Los Padres National Forest, Reyes supervised firefighting units. . .
Despite the destruction caused by these fires, the ever-present danger of injury or death, the extreme heat, and the horrendous hours that usually extended into days. . .as well as the makeshift support facilities maintained for early firefighters, Reyes never lost a man from one of his units.
A ranger has to watch his men every minute to keep them from getting into trouble, and this is especially true when working with an inexperienced gang of fighters.
A sudden change of wind, a lowering barometer or the fire jumping from one kind of vegetation to another can change the whole complexion of a fire quicker than a Spaniard can say ‘Hasta la vista.’
If you do not watch your business, you can get all your men trapped in the fire as easily as starting a forest fire.
—J.D. Reyes
Reyes’ concern for his men was matched by his concern for the environment.
He was an early advocate of reforestation, a policy not officially adopted by the Forest Service until approximately 1910.
. . .
Accepted by the Forest Service in 1900 as a temporary employee, Reyes received a permanent appointment on October 4, 1900.
The following year, Reyes and other rangers in the area escorted President William McKinley through Ventura during a parade arranged in honor of the President.
In 1905, Reyes was again present at a parade held in honor of another president, Theodore Roosevelt, and rode through the streets of Santa Barbara on ‘the right side of the President’s carriage.’
. . .
Reyes, although apparently a good story-teller, was a self-effacing man who never boasted of the work he had done to open trails through the Cuyama District, . . .
Others, however, were quick to acknowledge the role he had played in making the Cuyama District more accessible to the public.
. . .for twenty years Thacher camping parties enjoyed J. D.’s hospitality and that the success of their trips was due to his fine work in keeping the mountain trails open. The Thacher boys often remarked that when they got into J. D.’s district, trails were well ditched and in good repair . . . and J. D.’s career . . . has been a great lesson to Thacher boys.
—Forest H. Cook, Headmaster of the Thacher School
What sets Reyes apart from his contemporaries and from those who followed him was that he was the only ranger in the U.S. Forest Service to work 30 years in one district, . . .
Reyes is an outstanding example of a Chicano humanist, environmentalist, and conservationist.”
Related Posts:
Gladiator Games of Bulls and Bears: Recollections of Jacinto Damien Reyes (1880s)
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 