Marin native plant defenders mark 50 years

The local chapter of the California Native Plant Society has grown to about 600 members since its founding.

When Carolyn Longstreth moved to Marin from the northeast 18 years ago, the first thing she searched for was a place to learn about the new plant life around her.

“Our plants here are so amazingly diverse and they’re so different from the plants back east,” Longstreth said. “There are so many microhabitats and the evolutionary story here is just amazingly complex, which gives us this amazing variety.”

The Inverness resident is a member of the Marin County chapter of the California Native Plant Society, a statewide nonprofit focused on saving native plants and places. This year, the local chapter is celebrating 50 years of advocating for the area’s native flora.

The California Native Plant Society was founded in 1965 to preserve Tilden Botanic Garden in Berkeley. The Marin County chapter was founded nine years later. Within three months, it had more than 100 members.

Today, its numbers have swelled to around 600. The volunteers’ work spans everything from identifying native plants in the county and advocating for preservation of essential lands and species to helping plan trails and native plant gardens.

Based in Sacramento, the California Native Plant Society has 34 regional, volunteer-run chapters. Members work to promote native plant appreciation, horticulture, education and conservation in their area. The Marin chapter offers talks, workshops and field trips while also holding native plant sales, doing advocacy and restoration work, and raising funds.

“I’m incredibly proud of and grateful for the work that the Marin County chapter has done over the past 50 years,” said Jun Bando, executive director of the California Native Plant Society. “With incredibly dedicated, passionate and creative volunteers at the helm, I know the Marin chapter is in good hands.”

In Marin, there are 140 rare plants — many of them endemic — in the society’s inventory, such as the bent-flowered fiddleneck, seaside bitter cress and fragrant fritillary. About 20 plants, like the baker’s larkspur or the Point Reyes meadowfoam, are listed as endangered, threatened or rare at the state or federal level.

Only a year after the chapter formed, members got to work. The chapter helped with a campaign to save Ring Mountain from development and raised $4,400 for the Nature Conservancy to help purchase the land in the 1980s. The 385-acre preserve has at least nine endemic species — like the rare Tiburon mariposa lily, the chapter’s logo — along with other sensitive and protected plants.

The Marin chapter continued to support larger campaigns, like gathering support for the state Coastal Conservation Act of 1976, or collaborating with the state and federal park services to document local native and rare plant species. However, much of the essential work they do is on the ground in Marin County.

Laura Lovett, a board member of the chapter for the past eight years, has worked on planting pollinator and native plant gardens in the road medians, parking lots and vacant garden beds. She maintains many of them herself, but often works with city departments and local foundations to get needed materials.

She said a major challenge in getting people invested in native plants is that many do not realize how beautiful native plant gardens can be.

“Native plants are essential, they are not optional,” Lovett said. “A lot of the reason I did these things is because we need to show people what native plants can look like.”

Lovett joined the chapter eight years ago when the area went through a drought. In maintaining her own garden, she decided she needed to learn about native flora and planting them.

Native plants have adapted over a millennia to the local climate and soil, and the insects and animals have adapted alongside them. In California they typically use between one quarter to half the amount of water that non-native plants and shrubs use, thanks to the drier climate. As the foundation of the food web, the native plants support biodiversity and help build resilient and healthy ecosystems.

Non-native plants, which can often be invasive like Scotch broom, tend to outcompete native ones for space, sun, nutrients and water. Animals and insects might avoid them, causing more stress on native plants.

Mischon Martin, chief of conservation science, projects and design with the Marin County Parks and Open Space District, said the chapter has been invaluable to the district, especially to her when she began in 2000.

“We’ve been partners for so long with them, they feel like a colleague,” Martin said.

Every spring, the chapter created lists of every native, non-native and rare plant in Marin’s preserves and parks. The group provided the lists to every park service, water district and environmental agency they could.

“When the natural resources program started, there was only one of me so I relied heavily on them,” Martin said. “I can’t even imagine what I would do without them. We rely on them as our local experts in plant conservation and as advocates for native plant conservation.”

The chapter goes beyond knowing what to protect by helping local agencies plan trails and access points. Martin said that when planning a trail in Bowman Canyon, the chapter found a pitted onion that previously was not believed to exist there and helped reroute the trail to protect the onion.

Lovett said many members zero in on what they are passionate about. For some that is identifying plants and building plant lists or hosting field trips and guided nature walks. For others, it may be writing letters in favor or against relevant policy.

For Longstreth, it is helping find a balance between wildfire fuel reduction and conserving plant habitat. For about four years, local chapter members, along with other environmental groups, have been meeting with the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority to talk about how to manage vegetation while also protecting essential habitat. She said many other chapters are struggling to talk with fire agencies.

“They do listen to us,” Longstreth said. “This is so unique to Marin County, that even the fire prevention people, even the agency that is composed of a lot of firemen, are receptive to environmental concerns and they share them. We’ve established a good relationship with them.”

For example, she said last spring, she said the agency weed-whacked native plants that were flowering in Novato. Mowing or weed-whacking in the summer can disrupt the reproductive life cycle of native plants because many do not drop their seeds until late summer.

“We were suggesting that they try to think of this in their mowing schedule, that mow any native areas later in the season, like August or September,” Longstreth said.

Lovett said one of the last places people have influence on is their home. While the issues of large scale biodiversity loss and climate change can leave people overwhelmed, it’s important to start somewhere — using less water, planting native flora in the garden and avoiding pesticides.

“People think, oh, that won’t make a difference, but we got here by all these little cuts, one parking lot, one care at a time, and built what we have now,” Lovett said. “It’s not like some government is going to wave a magic wand and fix it. I think people want something to do.”

For the chapter’s 50th anniversary, it is holding several contests throughout the year. They include one that outlines 50 acts aimed at getting people to consider how choices about their property may affect other living things; a high school student native plant photography contest; and a native plant identification challenge.

“I think people want something to do to make a difference, and it is a little difference, but all the little differences add up, especially if a whole neighborhood does it,” Lovett said.