Restore the dunes

Pause and take in the view at the top of the bluff on Seaside Beach, just north of Carmel, California. Here, a few hundred yards from busy State 1, the beach stretches out for what seems like miles--and colorful dune plants cling to the shifting sands.

Seaside's dunes come courtesy of a partnership between California State Parks and the Beach Garden Project, a local community group that rallied to the rescue after the area was taken over by a messy tangle of ice plant and other non-native species. The intruders were cleared out and replaced with so-called pioneer plants--beach sagewort, dune buckwheat, and pink and yellow sand verbena--which quickly reestablished themselves in the hardscrabble coast environment. Similar restoration programs are now taking shape up and down the West Coast. Here's to a good deed catching on.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Sunset Publishing Corp.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning