Goodbye, Canada

I learned that there's a Mediterranean climate in Canada's coastal islands in the vicinity of Victoria. A Garry oak woodland on many of the islands is in decline. It shares characteristics with oak woodlands in California.

Kings Canyon 6-23-13

One of the highlights of my summer was a backpacking trip in Kings Canyon.  Here we are on approach:

Oak attrition on the Upper 40

The first three pictures show the fate of representative oak seedlings on the Upper 40. Recall that my brother and I had "planted" somewhere in excess of a couple hundred acorns last winter. Tens of those sprouted and I was optimistic that we'd have a bumper crop of new oaks. The gophers apparently like oak seedlings as much as I do. Here's a photo of one that I pulled from the ground. The second photo, a close up of the root, shows characteristic teeth marks.
















Photo 3 is one of the remaining seedlings, still apparently healthy. The loose earth nearby is tailings from a gopher hole, so that tells me that gophers can overlook nearby victims.







Photo 4 is of a plant that I suspect is a native, but I can't identify it. Can anyone out there?






Here's a photo of its leaves.

Margaret's Lavatera; gopher predation experiences

When We last saw Margaret's Lavatera assurgentiflora, in Margaret's Mallow it had grown significantly, but now it's even bigger.

Of the half dozen that I took to my parent's house and planted on the Upper 40, all but one at last check (during my trip back from Andrew Murray) had been destroyed by gophers. Gophers LOVE this plant, so much so that they will girdle the trunk and nibble small branches above ground. The one surviving Lavatera is in a partially shaded area and somehow the gophers hadn't spied it at last check. These are really good looking large shrubs with flowers all over like Margaret's picture when they are a bit older, so it's a shame to lose so many. Here's a photo from Feb 15 where there's signs of above ground nibbling.

Another Lavatera was eaten about 3/4 of the way through and lying on the ground. The remaining upright trunk at left is girdled all around. By April, these were all dead as doornails.


A Mimulus croaked, and it looked like gopher predation, but I'm not 100% sure.

In contrast, a different good looking flowering plant, Romneya coulteri (Matilija Poppy at left) planted at several locations on the Upper 40 - including a couple right in the middle of the gopher hills - seems to be doing well with no noticable gopher predation. It will start slowly this year but next year ought to have plenty of great looking flowers. Holding the earth on this hill is a chore that's probably well suited to the root structure of R. coulteri. The weeds are Oxalis pes-caprae or Oxalis cernua (Sour grass, originally from South Africa). Gophers tend to farm that stuff in my experience.

Also surviving and flourishing despite gophers were several salvias (a white hybrid [perhaps Salvia apiana x leucophylla "Desperado"] that was too large for my yard, a S. Clevelandii selection propagated from cuttings in my yard, and local black salvia [Salvia mellifera?] that I grew from cuttings taken in the Santa Barbara chaparral) as well as a buckwheat.

Surviving with minor gopher predation were California poppies and any number of little oak seedlings growing from the several hundred acorns my brother and I planted last fall.

Oak leaf moth

I've just moved this post up to the top of the list because I added the long-anticipated pictures of Oak Leak Moth poop.

One of the hazards that California Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia) trees face is infestation by oak leaf moths. My father educated me about this around the end of September with the main example being some trees on my parent's property: An older tree seems to have come through with a greater fraction of leaves intact but some smaller trees have been almost completely denuded.

Below are pictures of moth larval poop and an eaten leaf. The poop was caught up on a spider web, which is why it clumped together.

Coast live oak planting from acorns II

Last year I worked with my brother and father to plant several hundred acorns from local trees on the "upper 40" part of my parent's property near Santa Barbara. I wrote about that in Coast live oak planting from acorns I.

An oak mast last winter helped make it easy to collect the acorns. I've discussed masting before as well. Here and here.

I was disappointed that the acorns hadn't produced any visible growth back in February. I'm happy to report that we have about 30 oak sprouts on the upper 40 now. That's a 10 to 15% germination rate, assuming that my guess of 200 acorns planted is correct. None of the sprouts is more than a few inches tall, so there could be some attrition, but since we're getting into the cooler months, I'd guess that the main hazard is gophers rather than the weather.

Also, the one oak that I accidentally dug up last year had an extensive root system already, though the leaves were not yet visible. Were I to pull up any of the oak sprouts, I'd bet the growth would be mainly in the root.

Lessons: Wild grown acorns appear to sprout much slower than pot-grown acorns (these had natural rainfall and very limited supplemental watering). They also develop extensive root systems without much apparent above ground growth, unlike their potted siblings which will get very tall and root bound very quickly in a 1 gallon pot.

Oak masting in the news

chuck b. mentions oak masting and provides the link to a Sac Bee article on masting (focusing on the Valley Oak, their locally native species.)

From the article:

Folsom city arborist Ken Menzer said the origins of the ample acorn crop stretch back to 2006.

"That spring was really wet, and because of that, in the fall the trees put out lots of buds for flowers," Menzer said. "Then, in 2007, we had a really dry spring, which is perfect for pollination. So in the fall of 2007 we had lots of acorns that were viable."
...
As for all those tiny trees sprouting in your lawn, it's too late to save them if you don't want to let them grow in place. Oak trees grow long taproots right away, making them hard to move.

"Right now, I hate to tell you, just mow them over," said Ray Tretheway, executive director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation. "When an oak seedling sprouts up, and the first two leaves come out, that taproot is already two feet into the ground. You can't dig them up and transplant them at all."

Of course the real mystery about masting is why it's synchronized across the entire oak habitat and across oak species. An earlier post right here pointed the finger at research that supports a critical window of spring time temperatures as a signal, and as you'll recall, spring 2007 (the end of 2006 winter) had several weeks of unseasonable cold.

Coast live oak planting from acorns I

Back in late December my brother and I collected and planted a couple hundred Quercus agrifolia (Coast Live Oak or California Live Oak) acorns up on the "upper 40" hillside at my parents' place in Santa Barbara. Due to uncommonly cold weather in spring of 2007, the acorn yield was very high this year, so collecting the acorns was easy. Acorns came from the ground and from trees. Generally we just scratched a hole in the leaf mulch or soil and pressed them in with our thumb. My father and I also started some in 1 gal containers filled with local soil in case we didn't have enough rain.

Well, we've had enough rain (even down in Los Angeles, where a couple containers with acorns sat out in my back yard and had supplemental hose waterings). One of the two acorns (or more? I can't recall how many I planted, but it was at least two) sprouted the other day. Quercus agrifolia oaks sprouts are red when they first burst on the scene, and it takes them only a couple days to develop a recognizable oak leaf shape.

I expected to see many similar small sprouts on the upper 40, where perhaps 200 acorns were planted. However, I wasn't able to find a single sprouting acorn. I did inadvertently dug up couple acorns that I had previously planted there. One had formed an extensive tap root, but no structure above soil. The other I was not able to accurately observe.

In the 1 gal containers, many of the oak sprouts had already sent their roots down the bottom and in many cases they had started to coil around the container interior. The above ground to below ground ratio must have been 1:20 in some cases. Perhaps root confinement causes early above ground growth. In any case, I'm not willing give up on all the acorns on the upper 40. I think there's a good chance that we'll see a number of sprouts. The process will be to wait a year or two and then select winners if there are too many.


Californiaoaks.org has a recipe for preparing and storing acorns to plant, but I've found that with the two species I've tried here in southern California, that none of the washing in dilute bleach and cold storage is necessary, if starting in containers. I place the acorns in a tub of water and select those that sink to the bottom, scrape the soil to a depth of 0.5 - 1", place the acorn sideways in the hole, (a little up or down doesn't seem to matter) cover, and water.

Masting

I've just read an interesting article about masting. Masting is the phenomenon of heavy seed production in some years, followed by a scarcity of seed production in other years. California oaks have this characteristic. Masting is thought to be an evolutionary adaptation whereby predators of the seed are starved for a few years, reducing populations which are then more easily satiated in years of plenty giving the "left over" seed better chance at sprouting.

The most interesting aspect of masting is that it is temporally correlated across large distances. Locally, an entire woodland community might be masting and the odds are good that similar species hundreds of miles away will be doing the same thing.

The article is marred by an error, previously made in this very blog (as a working assumption, I'll add), but subsequently corrected. The authors make great hay with the fact that the most obvious possible correlating factor, rainfall, is normally distributed, something that Grace and I have discussed previously and emphatically disproved, at least for southern California.

Ultimately the authors conclude that temperatures in April, which are likewise correlated over large distances, are likely to be responsible for masting.

Grow more oaks.