This isn’t one of those springs when the hills are covered in a vivid profusion of wildflowers. The Santa Monica Mountains have received just a fraction of the average rainfall for the season. Hot weather is already arriving, drying out the soil.
The native wildflowers are adapted to a cycle of drought. Annuals like California poppies and lupine take advantage of whatever rain they receive to quickly grow and bloom and set seed. Others did not receive enough moisture to germinate. Some perennials and plants that grow from bulbs or corms simply save their energy for another year.
It will be many years—five at least—before the burned hillsides in Topanga are once again covered with ceanothus blooms, and even where the ceanothus did not burn this year, the annual flowering is subdued and sporadic.
Spring is always ephemeral in the local mountains, but even when the showy wildflowers don’t appear, there is still an abundance of flowers overhead. All over Topanga Canyon, trees are in bloom.
That dust of chartreuse powder on the windscreen in the morning is a sign that life can thrive even in times of drought.
Chaparral trees and shrubs are a vital source of nectar for pollinators. Many of these species have roots that run deep. They can often still flower even when conditions are not ideal.
The coast live oak Quercus agrifolia, is the backbone of Topanga’s chaparral ecology. Live oaks can live for more than two hundred years. In a good year, a mature tree can produce thousands of acorns and many thousands of catkins.
Live oaks are monoecious—meaning they produce both pollen-producing and pollen-accepting pistillate flowers. Coast live oaks depend on the wind to carry their abundant pollen from tree to tree. The nectar-producing flowers attract a host of native pollinators. Often, one can tell when the trees have begun to bloom just from the sound of the bees.
More than 270 species of insects, birds and animals rely on coastal live oaks for habitat and food. The entire life cycle of the beautiful California sister butterfly is tied to this tree. Before the arrival of European colonists, Indigenous peoples, including the Chumash and the Tongva, also depended on oak trees as a key source of food. There are still trees in the Santa Monica Mountains that are old enough to remember what that time was like, if trees can remember, and they might. Recent research has revealed that trees can communicate with each other.
Almost all of the native tree species are wind-pollinated: valley oaks, scrub oaks, sycamores, California black walnuts, willows and their cousins the cottonwoods, California ash trees, alders, and the relatively rare big-leafed maple. The air in spring is filled with the promise of new life.
There are a few exceptions. The California bay laurel is primarily pollinated by insects. So are most of the chaparral natives that are classed as small trees or large shrubs, including the Mexican elder, a host of ceanothus species, toyon and laurel sumac.
For allergy sufferers, the flowering season of trees is mercifully short. For bees and other pollinators, gathering tree nectar helps ensure the next generation of bees, wasps, flower flies, and butterflies will thrive and hatch. Insect species that reproduce on native trees provide a critically important source of caterpillars and larvae for nesting birds. This short season is a frenzy of activity. In a few short weeks or even days, the catkins dry out and drop to the ground. The trees leaf out and the vivid yellows and neon greens of spring swiftly give way to the dusty muted colors of summer.
Topanga’s trees are an important part of what makes this community so beautiful. Some regard the dusting of pollen that covers everything for a few short weeks in spring as a nuisance, but for the trees themselves and the myriad species that depend on them for survival, it’s a blessing, a promise for tomorrow.
