Locals Only

The downtrodden and the threatened come together weekly on the grounds of the San Francisco County Jail in San Bruno for an exercise of remarkable symbiosis. The Earth Stewards, a pilot program founded by Catherine Sneed, employs at-risk adults ages 18 to 24 to grow...

A new book on California native plants has hit the shelves, opening the door for interested gardeners wishing to learn more about our local flora. Trend- spotters agree that interest in native plants is growing. Classes in native plant horticulture are drawing...

My comrade Pete Veilleux, native plant landscaper and bushwhacking enthusiast nonpareil, asked if I would like to join him on a hike to see a secret corner of Oakland. Not far from his house in the teeming East Bay 'hood where oaks no longer grow, steep mountains...

Few explorers would expect to find a beach hidden in the middle of a redwood grove. Yet such incongruities lurk in the mountains above Santa Cruz, where ancient seabeds upthrust millions of years ago by tectonic turmoil gave rise to stark hills of sand now tucked...

Distant rumblings from city hall portend a boom on Treasure Island, the former Navy base on the brink of becoming San Francisco's newest residential neighborhood. This exercise of urban planning in the middle of the bay will be a closely watched experiment. Early...

Water paints with shifting colors the divided contours of the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma, California. The blues and greens of oak and bay forests on protected north-facing slopes complement the fire and earth tones of chaparral on the south-facing sides. Here at the...

Passover comes this Sunday, a rite from the Biblical story of Exodus, wherein the enslaved Israelites win their freedom from Pharaoh. It seems a fitting context for a discussion of The Acres, an indentured ecosystem on the wildland-urban interface. These substantial...

Often charming, occasionally gritty, surely up-and-coming -- witness the real estate renaissance of Bernal Heights, S.F.'s neo-boho neighborhood where once-dilapidated homes now zoom at the speed of commerce beyond the million dollar threshold. Yet a liferaft floating...

The trappings of prosperity pursued by contemporary city dwellers emphasize the appeal of "living large," hinting that the ends of financial aggrandizement will justify any means. But here in the Bay Area, we also enjoy a wealth of nearby natural resources that remind...

"I just hiked to the top of Cedar Mountain Ridge," wrote Pete Veilleux, proprietor of East Bay Wilds landscaping, "and found some very cool plants including a bigberry manzanita 40 feet tall!" Incredulity rippled through the native plant coven. The standing record for...

The well-groomed greenery of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park demonstrates the power of mankind to transform an uncultivated landscape into a recreational playground. Once a windswept wildland, these former sand dunes and occasional oak groves were staked out in the...

November rain sings a song of connectivity. It completes the natural cycle, raising the rivers and recharging the aquifers, pouring from the air to the earth and back to the ocean whence it came. We find an extraordinary example of its ramifications in western Marin...

At the confluence of Redwood Creek and San Francisco Bay in southern San Mateo county, three islands shape-shift in drifting piles of river silt and sea salt. Boundaries may blur, but Smith and Corkscrew Sloughs divide this trio clearly into Inner, Middle, and Outer...

On a mountain range in Oakland, a lioness prowls her historic canyon. Rugged ridges and riotous riparian zones cleave the oak woodlands and chaparral into complementary halves. This is the intersection of sunlight and shadow, of wilderness and the urban, of knowledge...

Water and sand straddle the symbolic spectrum of living: while the former is biologically essential, the latter evokes the lifeless dunes of the desert. Yet here in San Francisco, where dunes define our geology and "normal" is anything but, the sandy banks of our...

Words bestow immortality: just as the book outlives its author, a name can outlast its human corollary. Many California landmarks bear the names of historic families, for example, providing a subtext that enhances our sense of local identity. The story behind each...

Predicting the future or understanding the past -- which is more important? Ask the Muwekma Ohlone, who settled the village of Petlenuc beside El Polin some 5,000 years ago; they knew lots about the local plants and animals, but had no idea this land would become the...

Daily we drive our cars or ride the bus to the city, glad for modern transportation yet melancholy for the fate of paved-over Nature, a presumed paradise lost. But pockets of the original wilderness still flourish among our Bay Area motorways, just as a rare flower...

Shifting identities and strange alliances occur along the wildland-urban interface, where natural ecosystems collide with cities and the side effects of human industry. Plants and animals living along these intersections must adapt to changing conditions, or perish....

Once upon a time, Twin Peaks stood as one mountain, a united man and wife. But the couple quarreled long and bitterly, until at last the Great Spirit cleaved them with a bolt of lightning. The neighborhood has been quiet ever since -- or so say the chroniclers of...

Here in earthquake country, the land moves in puzzling ways. Take Montara Mountain, a San Mateo landmark at the uppermost edge of the Santa Cruz Range, whose steep heights plunge dramatically through the fog down into the sea at Devil's Slide. It looks like the...

Leave your car in the parking lot on Skyline Blvd. in the Oakland Hills and step through the unknown, remembered gate onto the huckleberry path. Inhale the aroma of rain on the wind, a perfume mixed with the bouquet of a mature bay forest. Sheer rocky knolls punctuate...

A heavenly light shines this evening 800 feet above San Francisco Bay. Closer inspection reveals six strings of bright white bulbs hung from a 30-foot pole atop the peak of Angel Island, a tree-shaped beacon lit for the holidays. The architects of this symbolic arbor...

Standing solemnly in the middle of the hectic San Francisco peninsula, San Bruno Mountain nurses a pocket of pre-Colombian life largely unchanged by modern times, a rural island in an urban sea. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson ranks this site among the world's...

Fire danger is high on Mount Diablo in October -- perhaps because the arch-fiend haunts his namesake peak for the season of All Hallow's Eve, but more likely because the summer months have brought little water, and the parched local plant life must endure the...

Explorers from Great Britain and Spain reached the coastal waters of northern California in the mid-16th century, but somehow they missed San Francisco Bay: from their ships, the narrow Golden Gate must have looked like unbroken shoreline, or perhaps merely was...

The northeast slope of Mount Davidson supports a wonderful population of native wildflowers, grasses, and shrubs that, when planted at home, can enrich San Francisco gardens with a sense of local identity. This is also a botanical battlefield where mankind only...

Mysterious and epic dramas take place at the bottom of the sea, where massive forces meet microbiology. In the red peaks of Corona Heights we can read an engrossing chapter: this stark hill with the distinctive flora and the unbeatable view over San Francisco is...

Once upon a time, four creeks flowed in San Francisco, as rainfall draining from the central ridge of Twin Peaks and Mt. Davidson must return over land to its oceanic origins. But today the murmur of the eastward-flowing Mission, Islais, and Yosemite Creeks is heard...

If local gardeners rightly consider the Bay Area a slice of Eden, then the manzanita deserves special attention: its name is Spanish for "little apple." Knowledge and sin may not necessarily derive from this gorgeous evergreen, but temptation lurks always among its...