HOTEL CALIFORNIA

A look at the unique climate and keystone plants that form Ecoregion 11's habitats

- JEFF COX

WITH ALL THE SUNSHINE, warm weather and winter's atmospheric rivers soaking the West Coast, you'd think that California would be the home of a strong, ecologically complex native flora supporting an equally strong, complex fauna.

So I thought before moving in 1985 from my USDA Zone 6 homeland on the East Coast to Sonoma County's Zone 9 Mediterranean climate, just north of San Francisco. Over the past 40 years, I have come to 2 broad conclusions about this fabled region.

The first conclusion is to agree with Luther Burbank—a local guy from Santa Rosa and a horticultural genius who introduced over 800 new or improved plants into commerce from 1870 until his death in 1926—when he said, “I firmly believe, from what I have seen, that Sonoma County is the chosen spot of all this earth, as far as nature is concerned.”

The second conclusion is that this chosen spot has a delicate and easily damaged native ecosystem. It's true that you can grow just about anything here. Danny O'Keefe wrote a song about it: “In Northern California (Where the Palm Tree Meets the Pine).” But that’s a problem as well as a blessing. Most of the flora that you find here has been imported from elsewhere and cultivated by human beings.

The native vegetation features tall trees along the coast and parklike associations of oak trees and madrone (Arbutus menziesii) interspersed with areas of grasses and shrubs in inland areas. Once you’re over the coastal mountains into California’s flat Central Valley, the climate is no longer Mediterranean; it becomes a hot semi-desert that takes its water from rivers flowing from the north or meltwater from the snowpack on the Sierra mountains that rises to the east. The Central Valley is America’s vegetable garden because of its mild winters and water resources.