Chaparral spring

Sunset, April, 2006 by Peter Fish

Sometimes you need a hit of spring the way you need a drink of water. When that need strikes, a lot of people go out and admire tulips and daffodils and meadows.

Not me. I go to some steep hillside where tangled brush is stabbed by stray bursts of color. I go to where spring has come to the chaparral.

Chaparral, if you're a natural-history kind of person, is the hardwood shrub forest that covers much of California, from the mountains behind San Diego to pockets of the Mendocino coast to slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Chaparral, if you aren't a natural-history person, is the drab brush that blots the scenery you've come to see: Mt. Tamalpais, say, or Big Sur or the folded hills above the movie star homes of Malibu.

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"Chaparral needs some kind of ambassador," says Richard Halsey, a teacher-turned-biologist who, as founder of the California Chaparral Field Institute, is trying to be just that. It sure does, or at least a good PR firm. When it comes to California flora, the world loves redwoods and the world loves palm trees, but the world does not love chaparral. That was, Lord knows, true of me. I grew up in chaparral country and my early memories of it come from Boy Scout hikes, trudging through mile upon mile of prickly scrub oak and manzanita, worrying about rattlesnakes and pleading futilely for shade.

But a strange thing happened when I moved away, to places like Virginia and Texas. I found myself longing for California, and longing above all for chaparral.

What I like about chaparral is that these most Californian of plants behave in very un-Californian ways. To the rest of the world, California is about ease and excess: spas, swimming pools, and bratty pop stars. Chaparral is about scarcity and hardship. It is one of the plant communities that has evolved for a Mediterranean climate of hot, dry summers and wet winters. It survives on little rain and bad soil. It grows in a low canopy so dense you can't penetrate it. Cowboys' chaps are called that because they protected riders' legs from chaparral; a trek through the San Gabriel Mountains' chaparral made John Muir say he had encountered the place where "Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage."

From May into November, chaparral is parched, almost waiting to burn--which, because it is rich in oils and resins, it does fiercely. Then come the winter rains. Pow. Out pop toyon and manzanita flowers. The rains continue, winter slides toward spring. More flowers bloom: red paintbrush, orange monkey flower, the eggs-over-easy exuberance that is Matilija poppy. And, above all, ceanothus: frothy blue and white blooms that Californians should treasure the way Virginians do their dogwood and Texans their bluebonnets.

April is the last hurrah for this show. Soon it will be summer, soon the hills will be brown. But for right now, you get the best of both worlds: spring warmth and chaparral largesse, sunshine and ceanothus.

It's a tough business, honoring spring. It's like New Year's Eve--the pressure is on you to find the one experience that will live up to your wildest hopes. All I can say is that hiking through chaparral on a March or April morning has never disappointed me. There you are, struggling uphill, and a cloud of blue ceanothus lifts you to the sky. Life is hard: That is one lesson chaparral teaches. Life is filled with beauty: That is another. If there is a better means of receiving the hopeful message that is spring, I don't know where you'd find it.

INFO: The California Chaparral Field Institute (www.californiachaparral.com)