Milkweeds for Monarchs

Dwindling monarch butterfly populations have prompted some gardeners to pepper their landscapes with milkweeds, the various plants in the Asclepiadaceae family on which monarchs lay their eggs. Chubby, zebra-striped monarch caterpillars gorge themselves on the plants' milky alkaloid sap, which makes them poisonous to birds.

The question for many isn't whether to grow milkweed, but how -- and which kind.

In Connie Day's Santa Monica garden, a tiger-colored monarch spars with another butterfly, chasing it from a patch of milkweeds.

"The challenge is keeping the food here," Day says, noting that a few monarchs can defoliate a plant in a couple of weeks.

Read the rest of this story in LA Times Home.

Octopus's Garden

Leo Carrillo State Beach

Last Sunday we spent a glorious afternoon peering into the homes of starfish, crabs, anemones and octopi.

Exceptionally low tide exposed lots of rocky reef at Leo Carrillo (pictured in video above). Tufts of eelgrass made some rocks look like punk-rocker heads, i.e. topped with green hair. Ten-foot-long strands of giant kelp (Macrosystis pyrifera) lay limp, offering a good look at their holdfasts (the bottom of the plant that anchors to the seabed).

Giant kelp, I'm told, is the largest marine plant known on earth, capable of growing to 100 feet in about a year.

My son enjoyed gently touching Pacific sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus) and anemones (Anthopleura sola), as well as observing hermit crabs.

Mom was thrilled to see two tentacles of a two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) before it wedged itself more deeply under a rock. These little guys are great camouflage artists, as well as contortionists. So look for them in crevices. This species takes its name from two, eye-like spots on its hood.

If you visit tide pools, please tread with extreme care. It's easy to squash the animals--especially soft-bodied ones such as nudibranchs--and with so many people visiting the beach, the impact is considerable. Never remove anything from a tidepool, even an empty shell--for one thing, you'll be messing with the hermit crab housing market.

Check out our previous intertidal romp at El Matador State Beach.

This Summer I was fortunate to take a hike with Mickey Long, who supervises natural areas for LA County Parks and Recreation. I asked him to join me at one of the more depressing spots in the Angeles Forest front country--the trail from Chantry Flat to Stuartevant Falls.

Although we spotted a number of wildflowers along the fire road descending into Big Santa Anita Canyon--including indian pinks and native delphinium (both pictured below)--we sampled a Smorgasbord of weeds: annual grasses, Spanish broom, euphorbia, arundo, bladder senna, eucalyptus, even rock roses. "Aesthetically there's something missing from the landscape," said Long, "both in form and function. The danger here is,

even though we're seeing plenty of native plant habitat, if a fire comes through, the weeds will get the upper hand."

Long pointed out Western Fence and whiptail lizards, hunting for bugs in the underbrush. He said the non-native grasses don't support the variety of insects that the native plants do.

Things didn't get any more cheerful when we arrived at the stream.

English ivy blankets 3.5 miles of stream bank.

Cabin owners planted the ivy decades ago and it's run amok. To keep the alders alive, they clip it off of the trunks. But the ivy (with a little help from some Himalayan blackberry) has crowded out most of the native plants. On a subsequent trip I counted only three Humboldt lilies (pictured up top) persisting along the stream.

Long said no one has studied the effect of the ivy infestation on native animals, but "there's not too many ways this could be beneficial to a native animal." Amphibians need to be able to move from the stream where they breed and to the adjacent hillside where they burrow. "They need to feed as they move around, and I don't know what food sources are left under there."

You can learn more about garden plants that threaten wildlands in these stories I reported for KPCC-FM.