Great Valley / Dead Valley

(not just a good valley—a great valley)

Not all of a piece, for various reasons:  

Mid-valley maritime zone

North valley wet winters

South Valley dry winters

Soil “blocks” from white powder to black loam to alkali playa to heavy blue clay to red gravel.

East side with lots of rivers and creeks from Sierras.  West side with almost none.

Delta

Tulare Lake

Differences originally (and best) mirrored by the patchwork of native vegetation:  Atriplex etc with goldfields and spikeweed between, in south San Joaquin; vernal pool/mima grasslands mostly along east side?; “crazy quilt” of annuals in big blocks; alkali sinks; vast wetlands (mostly seasonal); riparian/Valley Oak groves

These differences (some of them) are now mirrored in the various crops:  citrus and grape, pistachio, almond, irrigation pasture(N), row crops, olive, fig, stone fruits

Once myriad spring insects as well as flowers.

Flower-fields humming with many species of bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, and colorful diurnal moths.

Now only “weedy” insects and some grasshoppers because of:

1. Extreme fragmentation
2. Indiscriminate spraying

Now the lands—even the surviving natural lands, and even when by some miracle there persist native plants among the ripgut and the foxtails—are silent, even in spring.

And . . .Ripgut Brome, Red Brome, Farmer’s Foxtail, Mediterranean Barley, Foxtail Fescue, and of course Star Thistle and Filaree, and a host of others (Bur Clover, Melilotus, Black Mustard, etc.).  Each one has eaten more of California than all the cities and golf courses and freeways put together.

We/California were lucky when in the early days of European occupation, the only “weeds” were the relatively benign (and even edible) Wild Oats and Field Mustard.