Azalea Creek at The Cedars; The Blob and Mule Trail.

 Looking East up the Azalea Creek drainage, following the abandoned mule trail.

The Cedars, the massive "island" of ultramafic rock (=serpentine) in NW Sonoma Co. California is a large place.  Further, the limited number of people who have had a chance to visit its amazing canyons, have generally only seen a small part of the place.  Typically we tour people around our Main Canyon parcel where the trails we constructed make the formidable terrain accessible.  Trails are unquestionably the easiest way to make the inaccessible, accessible, not to mention more enjoyable.

But for those who have visited before, our second favorite place to take them is Azalea Creek, the second largest drainage (watershed) within The Cedars.  Azalea Creek has some exceptional features, including the largest calcium carbonate formation at The Cedars and some of the most ancient old-growth Sargent cypress woodland (Hesperocyparis ((=Cupressus)) sargentii.)

 A view from across the canyon of The Blob, the largest calcium carbonate (travertine) feature at The Cedars. The creek runs diagonally across the picture but is hidden by the trees.

 View toward the central portion of The Blob in late afternoon light.

 

 In the center is a grotto like space, The Maw (sometimes called The Balcony), with its fanciful stalactite-edged hooded roof.

Another unique feature of Azalea Creek is the remains of a mule trail that accessed at least two mining areas in this watershed, this mining area being called the Yellow Streak Mine.  The Yellow Streak Mine is one of three chromite mines in The Cedars, the other two being in the Main Canyon (and known as the Rattlesnake Mine and The Slats).  But these later two mines had a road to take out the ore, and in East Austin Creek over the ridge, the magnesite mines there had a small gauge railroad to haul that out to civilization.  But in Azalea Creek they used a mule, and carved a route through the rocky slopes and talus to get to and from these mines.

Here, looking W down Azalea Creek, an early stretch of the mule trail can be seen carved into the cliffside in the center. It then passes through a woodland and re-emerges near the base of the orange toned hillside, not far above the vegetation near the bottom, but is not distinct enough to see clearly in this image. About half way across this relatively flat area the trail split; one branch heading down to the creek ultimately, the other climbing up to the right where a stretch is visible to the right of, and near the top of, the tall tree in the right corner. 

An approximation of the trail route is drawn in fuchsia below.

A stretch of the mule trail cut into rock; such areas tend to be the best preserved.

Here I am on the trail approaching the first of two mining areas.  Photo by David McCrory.

An interrupted sloping line across the center horizon shows portions of the trail, but in the gully it is completely gone; thus this is as far as most can get, as the drop off is precipitous.  To circumvent these washouts is very difficult and dangerous.  This photo by David is from down in the creek, and for scale, you might be able to make me out in the gully where the upper gullies converge.

 Ultimately the mule trail reached the upper canyons of Azalea Creek, which are deep and so narrow as to be very difficult to utilize for access. Thus the trail had to cut across some steep cliffs and talus slopes to get to the upper mining area, which would have been beyond the right edge of this picture.

 In this closer view the trace of the trail can be seen as a shallow diagonal across the center horizon of this picture - going from the spine of the ridge on the left side to the woods on the right side. The cliffs to the left of the spine have become so eroded, the trail is not only impassable, but it is hard to even find any remnant.

 As the trail continued up this canyon - the North Fork of Azalea Creek - it passed in and out of two wooded zones and then emerged (not visible here) from the center of the left side of this picture.  It then heads over to, and above the strange rock outcrop with the large white spot and continues beyond at the base of the rocks with the marble-cake like coloration.  These ochre colored bands are believed to be the 'yellow streaks" that gave the mine its name.

The terminus of the trail was this strange arcing cliff face about 12' high, with a shallow overhang, .  This area is to the immediate right of the previous picture.

 Looking W down Azalea Creek, Mohrhardt Ridge (not part of The Cedars) in the distance (bluish green).  The two previous pictures would be to the right of this view (though not immediately so), but this view includes about 90% of the mule trail.  The visible parts of the trail are drawn in fuchsia in the image below. The gaps in the center are where the trail is obliterated by erosion.

A picture drawn by a guest staying at the Berglund Ranch in 1948 (now Campbell Ranch) of A. L. Laton and his wife Wanda, riding home to Cazadero.  Laton was the operator of the chromite mines at The Cedars.  The mines were about 10 miles from Cazadero and even today in a car, it seems like a very long journey.

Cardamine Uncertainty: The Cedars form of toothwort; heart-shaped foliage marbled in black, silver and purple.

Got milkmaids?

 The lovely rhizome (corm) leaves of toothwort at The Cedars showing conspicuous marbling of silver and purple; the undersides of the leaves are always deep purple as is typical for species.

Most Californian plants take advantage of the winter rainy season to get started in their life cycles, but few complete the full process of growing, flowering and setting seed completely contained within these rainy months.  At The Cedars (Sonoma Co., CA) there are a few annuals that fit this pattern, and one showy perennial, California toothwort.

 

The flowers of toothwort are very early season, often appearing before December, but they are showy and cheerful, especially in the two months they have the flowering "field" to themselves.  They can be white or pink initially, but all turn darker pink to rose as they age.  On dry days they face outward or upward, but become nodding during rainy weather.  They close at night and stay that way on dark days.

The toothworts were formerly in the genus, Dentaria, the Latin name referring to teeth, and the roots of the European species were used medicinally for tooth-ache (another common name for this group in California is milkmaids, I assume due to some visual similarity).  A few decades ago, all the Californian species (as well as others) were re-assigned to the genus Cardamine (car DAM in-knee), a genus previously most known to temperate climate gardeners by popweed, Cardamine oligosperma, an annoying weedy pest whose seed capsules explode when ripe, flinging the seeds everywhere - often in the gardener's eyes.  While today it is considered a weed exploiting the human tendency to create disturbed soil, popweed was once native just to the Western US. There is actually one small spot within the canyon system of The Cedars where popweed is found; whether it was native to the site or brought in by human traffic is uncertain.)

 

A solitary juvenile plant on the left, a mass of dozens on the right.  The dreaded popweed, a common garden "pest" during the winter months.  It's short season from germination to exploding seed capsules can be as short as 8 weeks.  In dry gardens this is mainly a weed of the cool season, but in irrigated landscapes can be a problem year round.

 

Anthocyanins are dark pigments found in many plants such as the purple color of "red" cabbage, the purple of purple-leafed plums or eggplant skin, the blue of blueberries, the black of blackberries, etc. The race of toothwort at The Cedars seems to represent an enhanced anthocyanin version of the more widespread species (Cardamine californica).
 












Young growth often emerges and exhibits very dark, almost black coloration; seen above left in front of rock with leaf and new stem.  Right picture shows coloration persists into stem elongation and early flowering.

 Today in California - using currently published Floras - we have about 10 native toothwort species, each with one or many varieties; worldwide there are about 170 species.  However the way we look at and name our toothworts is changing.  In the future the new, The Jepson Manual II (JM II) and the Flora of North America (FNA), the author or these groups, Ihsan Al-Shehbaz, will be reducing to synonomy many names that we have been using in JM I.  According to Al-Shehbaz - lead author for the entire Brassicaceae or Mustard Family - in our area of the North Bay there will only be two choices, C. californica and C. nuttallii; C. californica being more southern, while C. nuttallii goes N into British Columbia.  But even using this highly reduced choice of  possibilities, the plants at The Cedars still seem ambiguous.

 
















Rhizome leaf, the first leaf to appear and typically different looking from the leaves on the flowering stems which emerge just afterward.  Both here show strong purple coloration in the upper leaf while the leaf on the right also shows the silvery character (rather than green).


Beyond the basic question of what is the best species name for this entity, there is the fact that the plants at The Cedars have characters not characteristic of either species - especially the pronounced leaf coloration/mottling characters shown in the pictures.  Before corresponding with Al-Shehbaz, I had thought I had hit on the answer, as I noticed that in the Sonoma Flora (Best et al, 1996) that C. pachystigma var. dissectifolia was listed as occurring in NE Sonoma Co. up N of Cobb Mt.  Looking up this entity online (CalPhotos, Plant Profiles and CalFlora), the pictures of both the species, C. pachystigma and its variety, dissectifolia, have the silvery, purple streaked/mottled leaves of those plants at The Cedars.  It didn't seem implausible to think that if this variety occurred in NE Sonoma Co., it could also occur in NW-Central Sonoma Co as a disjunction (separated range or distribution).  It seemed particularly plausible as both those entities have an almost exclusive occurrence on serpentine soils and rock - thus The Cedars seemed ideal.  Furthermore, several dozen other plants at The Cedars are disjunctions - thus this fit that "theme" perfectly.

The early foliage leaves (without stems) are almost always simple roundish or heart-shaped, though a few may have secondary leaflets.  This plants shows all the odd characters; dark coloration, splotching w purple, and silvery sheen on upper leaf.

But since in JM II, C. pachystigma will be restricted to plants with simple leaves on the stem (not 3 or 5-foliate as at The Cedars)  and its variety (v. dissectifolia) won't even exist (except as a synonym of C. pachystigma), this option is no longer a possibility as a name.  Since C. californica is so widespread in our area, it is perhaps enticing to place The Cedars toothwort into the more northern species, Nuttall's toothwort, however more features fit California toothwort than that species.  Thus we are left with considering it as just an exceptional form or race of California toothwort.

 Cluster of early rhizome leaves before flowering stem emerges.  Because there are no gophers in The Cedars, some plants can develop into substantial clusters.

As one drives into The Cedars, typical California toothwort is common in grassy meadows, oak savannah, and open woodlands for many miles - there is nothing unusual about this.  As soon as one enters the "hard" serpentine canyon of The Cedars though, one can immediately recognize that the plant has become different - more isolated individuals, shorter and stouter, thicker leaves with pronounced colorations on the upper surface, and more pink or rose pink flower color (some are white, but all age pink, while some start deep pink and age deeper).  It is clear that The Cedars entity is not only more obvious, it is bolder in nearly every visual feature.  To my eye, the plants remind me of the vigorous robust plants one would see in the first season of an area that has burned (the previous season) - sort of an exaggerated example of what the plant might more normally look like.  Here however, there has been no fire and these characters show up every year even in overgrown sites.

 












Some leaves have pointed tips on the lobes, others curl back.



So for now, it seems best to consider that these plants have gradually exaggerated certain features that exist in the widespread species, but which probably fit the habitats within The Cedars better.  The more pronounced anthocyanin throughout the plant suggests it has gone the same way that the Cedars' endemic purple-leaf stream orchid (Epipactis gigantea f. rubrifolia) has - producing a unique race characterized by this enhanced coloration.


Anthocyanin anyone?  The darkest plants would be interesting horticultural selections - however my previous experience trying to grow these at UCBG (Berkeley) suggest this race is challenging and impermanent in cultivation.
It must be kept in mind that the colorations in the young leaves mostly disappears at seed maturity, although some dark or silvery tones may persist - these are primarily juvenile characters, but are conspicuous through flowering, even early seed development.  Another caveat is that since these characters have appeared at The Cedars, it is likely that similar races may have appeared elsewhere in open rocky sites - it would be nice to hear of anyone else's experience finding or observing them, and whether they are the same or unique in some other manner.


Since the Cardamine at The Cedars flowers exclusively during the rainy season, the flowers have dealt with that fact by easily bending over, becoming nodding, when wet - thus avoiding water splashing into the sexual parts (anthers and stigmas) of the flowers.  I initially wondered if the plants were using some "cue" on rainy days to nod, but it appears most likely that simply the weight of water droplets on the flowers cause this "adjustment", as even a heavy nighttime dew will cause the flowers to bend downward.  As can be seen in the above photos, petal size varies considerably - though most are the larger/bigger form as on the right.

The flowers of the toothwort are sweetly fragrant up close (similar to wallflowers (Erysimum)), though my nose does not detect any fragrance from even a foot away.  In ideal sites - such as loose rubble and talus openings in woodland or chaparral, each clone will form a small colony from underground spread, each colony easily separable from its neighbors by its distinctive leaf coloration or flower color and form.  While asexual root reproduction is common, each plant is usually surrounded by numerous and variable-looking seedling plants - suggesting sexual reproduction is equally or possibly the more common means of regeneration.  Like its popweed relative, each ripe silique (seed capsules) will explode - flinging its seed widely.  Even a single previous-season's dried seed scape may be surrounded by dozens of seedlings; their variability showing that the leaf characters are re-sorted in each seedling generation.

I used to think that the toothwort in The Cedars pretty much occurred everywhere within this ultramafic (serpentine) geological unit, but I've noticed this spring that it is actually rather restricted - though abundant and showy in the right places.  It seems most profuse in open chaparral or cypress woodland that is very park-like, and on the lower, more stable talus slopes, or rocky ledges.  On the rocky talus slopes it is the most impressive, each plant often forming a sizeable colony of basal foliage and one to many flowering stems, somewhat like a bouquet sitting in the sliding rocks.  Each plant is different from its neighbors; one with very silvery foliage, one with nearly black foliage, one without any markings at all - and everything in-between.   It is one of the joys of visiting The Cedars in the winter months.  It can start flowering as soon as 6 weeks after the first rains in fall, but peak months are always January and February when little else is showy.

What this plant's unusual characters reinforce to me is the fact that The Cedars has once again "pushed" a plant into a unique or at the very least unusual set of features - maybe not enough to constitute a species, but obviously distinct to the human eye. The Cedars rules!

Is the leaf coloration some sort of camouflage?  I used to say that the foliage seemed like it was trying to match the silvery, reptilian coloration of serpentine.  However I have yet to see a leaf that "disappears" against its background to my sight.  Thus, to benefit the plant overall any theoretical predator would have to be searching primarily by eyesight and have poor eyesight as well.  But who know?



(P.S. anyone missing my excellent article on The Cedars in Fremontia, the journal of the Calfornia Native Plants Society (came out in Dec. but listed as April 09), should consider joining the organization to get a copy.  It will be posted on-line in a few months at their website if you want to wait.)

Origin of a Species; the story of a new species for The Cedars, Sonoma Co.

Looking down into extensive serpentine rock barrens at The Cedars, habitat for the new species of buckwheat (Eriogonum).

It is always fascinating to look back and realize that something you initially thought was trivial has progressed into something quite important. The story of a new species to be named at The Cedars - that amazing serpentine canyon N of Cazadero in Sonoma Co., CA - began that way.

Ternate buckwheat, Eriogonum ternatum, Sanger Peak, Del Norte Co., CA

Pete Vielleux, a friend who runs a native plant nursery and landscape business, and who also regularly posts excellent photos of native plants and landscapes, eastbaywilds@sbcglobal.net , happened to be growing a selection of creambush, genus Holodiscus, called 'Shangri-La'. In July 2008, Peter Gonzalves from the USDA contacted him about the status of this name, 'Shangri-La', as he was compiling information on the widespread Western species of creambush, H. discolor and wanted to trace all the official cultivars (cultivated selections) of that species.

Snow Mountain buckwheat, Eriogonum nervulosum, Hyphyus Creek, Colusa Co. CA.

Pete V. forwarded the query to me as he knew I was likely to know more about it. I did know about this, as Shangri-La is a local place name at The Cedars, and a friend, Dan Segal, now of Plantsman Nursery in Ithaca, NY, dan@plantsmen.com, had put that name on a seed batch of Holodiscus he collected and grew when he was working for North Coast Natives nursery near Petaluma, CA. The Shangri-La site is the first parcel as one enters the serpentine canyon at The Cedars, and has been used by residents of this area to refer to a cluster of buildings that are said to be an old resort set adjacent to a marvelous swimming hole.

The Cedars buckwheat, Eriogonum cedrorum, at type locality across from the Upper Mine (site) at The Cedars, Sonoma Co., CA

The Holodiscus that this name, Shangri-La, was applied to has always intrigued me, as it doesn't fit any described Californian species, nor for that matter, any species I know about. It is sometimes lumped into the widespread coastal species of creambush, H. discolor, but differs greatly in most features. I have wondered about what name to put on The Cedars creambush since I first saw it in July 1981, but haven't yet found an answer. However, The Cedars creambush is another story and merely the background for the subsequent events.

Dr. James L. Reveal, authority on the genus Eriogonum, collecting specimens of The Cedars buckwheat, July 28, 2009.

Severe serpentine barrens of the type locality with several mats of The Cedars buckwheat visible below the rock outcrop.

So I conveyed the essence of this story to Peter Gonzalves, but mentioned that maybe Dan Segal could elaborate, and I cc'd my response to Dan. In one of those strange coincidences, Dan Segal was installing a garden in Ithaca NY for Rose Broome, the wife of the world's authority on the genus Eriogonum, Dr. James L. Reveal, of the Bailey Hortorium at Cornell. Dan had been telling Jim Reveal about The Cedars, and had mentioned that there was an unusual buckwheat there, which he remembered to be Eriogonum nervulosum, the Snow Mt. buckwheat (picture 3 above.)

Mat of The Cedars buckwheat showing fresh flowers (yellow) and scarlet aging flower heads.

Close ups of the flower heads of The Cedars buckwheat, showing mostly new yellow flowers. Each flower head is composed of several smaller clusters on separate branches that originate at a cluster of bracts that resemble narrow leaves.

In a reply to Dan, I mentioned that the buckwheat he was referring to was ternate buckwheat (see picture 2 above) and I sent a set of email pictures I had taken the week before at The Cedars to Dan who forwarded them to Jim. I nearly immediately get an email back from Jim Reveal politely telling me that my buckwheat name was wrong, that it almost certainly couldn't be ternate buckwheat at The Cedars. I was wise enough to know that one doesn't argue with an "authority", especially in a group as large and complicated as the genus Eriogonum. So I inquired, what is it then?

Close up of fresh and aging flower heads. Each "head" is composed of several clusters of flowers held in small cup-like structures called involucres. Each involucral cup contains many individual flowers that emerge for several weeks. In the head with the yellow flowers, note that each ring of flowers represents one involucral cup with more buds in the center. In peak flower (when the anthers and/or stigma are ripe), the individual flowers are held upright. Pollinated flowers age red as they get larger, their pedicels get longer, as they turn downward and hang over the side of the involucre.

I had long considered the buckwheat to be ternate buckwheat, E. ternatum, a species generally considered to be restricted to the Klamath region of NW CA. The population at The Cedars had been considered "extra-limital", a plant outside its normal range or at an extreme.

Another close up of the flowering heads. In the upper right you can see one involucral cup with 4 yellow flowers in the center surrounded by a ring of reddening aging flowers.

Thus began a correspondence; by sending pictures, making herbarium vouchers (dried specimens) that I mailed to him, and trying to make observations in the field at The Cedars. Being uncertain about some of the complex features specific to this genus that I was trying to observe, I made some mistakes, but Jim very patiently kept me on track. He also requested a number of Herbaria to send him their herbarium sheets of the two entities in question, E. ternatum and E. nervulousm. Because he was very busy with other work relating to the genus, and because it was also getting quite late in the season for flowering plants, he said, "Let's plan to look at it next July (2009)".

Two views of the full mat-forming plants with mostly finishing flowers or ripening seed. Note the foliage is covered with hairs giving a silvery or gray-green color to the plant. These hair typically will often fall off the upper surface by winter.

The history of our awareness of this buckwheat at The Cedars goes back to 1947, when Freedom Hoffman - the first botanist to explore and document the plants of The Cedars thoroughly - collected a non-flowering mat of foliage as an herbarium specimen. The Eriogonum authority at that time, Susan Stokes, annotated it (i.e, identified it officially) as E. nervulosum, the Snow Mt. buckwheat. Snow Mt. buckwheat is a gorgeous but rare species from extreme eastern Sonoma Co. (The Geysers) and also various isolated serpentine barrens of the Inner North Coast Ranges where it is a low to mid elevation species - except at the eponymous Snow Mt. where it occurs at 5,000' to 6,000' elev.

By mid-winter, here in early February, most of the hairs on the upper leaf surface have fallen off leaving a glossy, heart-shaped leaf. The bright red color is atypical, this plant being in a very stressful site, or perhaps it is preparing for Valentine's Day.

I was the first to collect the plant in flower at The Cedars. I had seen it on my first trip in 1981, but not in flower, and it wasn't until 1983 that I made a trip specifically to collect it in flower. I was surprised, as I was expecting the lovely fluffy pink flower heads of E. nervulosum, but instead the plants at The Cedars had fresh flowers of bright yellow which soon aged to maroon or burgundy-red. Back then, I sent herbarium specimens to the late Walter Knight, an authority on the flora of Sonoma County, and he identified it as E. ternatum, and indeed, it did "key out" to that as the primary distinction separating E. ternatum from E. nervulosum was flower color (yellow vs. whitish pink).

Looking across a canyon from one site of The Cedars buckwheat to another, however at this distance the plants are not visible. In The Cedars there is an enormous amount of bare rock which is highly fractured and thus falls apart constantly producing large talus slopes in the gullies and swales. These talus slopes are the preferred habitat for the buckwheat, yet only a small percentage have the buckwheat. The reasons for its limited distribution is unknown.

I have always been a little tentative about putting a name on buckwheats simply because there are so many, nearly 260 species in all, and almost 200 named taxa (named entities of any rank) in California. The features used to distinguish one from another are often quite small and variable, making it hard to feel certain that you've gotten it right. But I've always loved them as a group, enormously variable from annuals to tiny mats to 4' shrubs; but almost always lovely. Early on in my career in California I used to joke with Richard Turner (now editor of Pacific Horticulture magazine, http://www.pacifichorticulture.org/ ) that we should form an "Eriogonum Society" much like there is a Rhododendon Society or Primrose Society, etc. to highlight the horticultural wonders of the group. Jim Reveal now tells me that there is an Eriogonum Society at: http://eriogonum.org/.

While at the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley, I tried growing as many as I could collect or get seed of. Some were quite successful, others less so, but their typical summer-flowering habit made them an important component of the summer garden.

Looking across a canyon at a serpentine barren and talus slope; this view is a close up of the previous picture's upper right quarter's central section. With binoculars one could see perhaps 15 flowering plants, but in this image only about 5 are visible as red or yellowish mounds. The closely related Snow Mt. buckwheat grows in nearly identical sites, but in more interior terrain. The Cedars is less than 9 miles from the Pacific Ocean by air.

In late July Jim Reveal made a trip to the West Coast to look at several populations of buckwheats. On July 27th he visited a site on Walker Ridge in Colusa Co. in the Complexion Creek drainage to view and collect some Eriogonum nervulosum, the species he felt The Cedars entity belonged to botanically. We then drove up to The Cedars that evening to get an early start, as the next day was predicted to be in the high 90's F. Our neighbor up there, Bette Campbell was kind enough to let Jim stay in her guest cabin, while I "roughed it" up at our camp with the dogs.

Steep to shallow serpentine talus slopes seem to be where the Cedars buckwheat is happiest, forming sizable mats. The mats, a collection of small foliage rosettes with horizontal connecting stems is well adapted to shifting talus as the rock particles can filter through the mat and essentially "layer" the outer rosettes without burying them. In this view (not great) there are probably at least two dozen or more mats, though only about 8 show well.

Early the next morning, we met and hiked up to our Upper Mine site (one of two abandoned chromite mines on our parcel at The Cedars). Across from the mining scars is a 70 degree slope of bare rock and talus extending several hundred feet above the creekbed, the site this buckwheat calls home. We looked, photographed and collected some flowering specimens, but initially Jim realized that this was definitely not E. nervulosum, and in most features, quite similar to E. ternatum. It seemed, this was not going to be a new species; a little disappointing from my perspective, as field botanists always love to find that "new species". However I knew that the ultimate objective of taxonomic botany is to describe what is there, not what we want to be there. Dr. Reveal needed to fly back to Ithaca, so we left by late morning.

A week of so later, I received an email from Jim, saying that he studied both species (E. ternatum and E. nervulosum) and decided that The Cedars Eriogonum was indeed distinct. He asked if I would be a co-author of this new species. For me this was exciting and a great honor. It was exciting for The Cedars, as now it would have an 8th endemic taxon (endemic = restricted to; taxon = singular of described botanical entity of any rank, taxa = plural). It would also be quite rare, as the plant only occurs on a small fraction of what seems like suitable habitat within The Cedars.

Full circle. You may remember this story was prefaced by another story about The Cedars creambush, a mysterious Holodiscus species that intiated this sequence of events. The only woody shrub that occurs within the populations of The Cedars buckwheat, is this very Holodiscus. Here you can see a very old and largely dead shrub with dried flower heads growing amongst dozens of the Eriogonum, though in this picture only a few are faintly visible (one is in the shadow on the left of the creambush). Here we are looking down a large talus slope about 150' high where at least 200 buckwheats grow, though they do not register visibly. The previous picture was taken near the bottom of this slope but horizontal to this view.

In two weeks we had the botanical description written up; Jim did the taxonomic description, I did the habitat, ecological information and distribution map. It was submitted to the Journal of Botanical Research at Texas, reviewed, accepted and is already on its way to getting published. So now we can welcome to the botanical world, The Cedars buckwheat, Eriogonum cedrorum!

And what of the curious Holodiscus? Jim Reveal and I are currently investigating this entity as a possible new species, but more research needs to be done. Stay tuned!

Postscript: Pete Vielleux mentioned at the beginning of this story has just posted a large set of pictures from The Cedars for anyone wanting to see more of this terrain and its plants at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eastbaywilds/sets/72157622299892126/

For anyone using a topographic program, the type locality of this new buckwheat species is: 38degrees37'16"N, 123degrees07'37"W (sorry, still can't find the degree symbol - or any symbol - in this program).