Survivors in the Wild

Appropo to my last blog: On the last Sunday in October, along a narrow country road on my way to Tomales Bay, I witnessed California poppies in bloom. My jaw dropped. Time warp? Or are we abandoning seasons for an eternal spring? Hm-m. If that’s the case, will we ourselves come to live in eternal spring? And turn into grasshoppers, as in the Greek myth of Tithonus? Well, I hope not, but I think it all has something to do with survival of the fittest.
The other day I spent over three hours hiking Lynch Canyon. Autumn seemed to have sequestered itself there from the challenging youth of a warped springtime. There I saw still a few flowers—the last of some scraggly but hardy wild mustard, the determined convovulus, and three others.
In the flatland fields and slight slopes pocked with ground squirrel holes of this hilly acreage, I saw a fairly lavish display of Prairie Star (not the rose by the same name which I mentioned last time—still in ardent and profuse bloom, by the way). Of the saxifrage family, this Prairie Star (Lithophragma parviflorum) from a distance looks somewhat like sparse fleabane (Erigeron) ; it has three, sometimes five, white petals cleft into three lobes each, the whole blossom about three-fourths inch wide. My Audubon western region wildflower guide states that it grows from spring through June. Clearly, this is one hardy survivor.
As is a certain purple aster in bush form—but I’ve been unable to locate its precise name in any of my five books on wildflowers, not even in the 1965 copy of The Flora and Fauna of Solano County. Wild asters, yes, but not in bush form. Can someone suggest what this flowering plant might be, if not an aster?
And that goes for another bush form, one I’d never seen before. This was a lovely, lavender thistle shrub growing among dry grasses and cow paddies. Its head is a bit like the obnoxious star thistle rimmed in spikes, but the leaves of the bush, somewhat like prickly ox-tongue, are a variegated green. The skeletal remains of at least three others kinds of thistles stood about here and there. But this is either an early bloomer, a later bloomer, or a survivor. Does anyone know what this is?
On my return from my hike, I walked up to my hilltop garden. The first garlic plants were just poking through. No creature had yet munched on the tiny Swiss chard
And, wonder of wonders, a few, just three or four, of the once nibbled marigold plants were making a comeback, sprouting new leaves from their formerly naked stems. Survivors.
---Darrell g.h. Schra
Read more about the survival of local flora in Botanical Blog.