A field guide to the blooms of the East Bay
Between the salt marsh and the ridgeline there are perhaps four hundred flowering natives. These pages cover the eighty or so you are most likely to meet on an afternoon walk.
This guide began as a shared notebook. A handful of us walk the same stretches of shoreline and hill year after year, and we kept losing track of what we had seen and when. Writing it down turned out to be more useful than any of us expected — bloom dates drift, and a record of the drift is worth keeping.
Nothing here is authoritative. We are walkers, not botanists. Where we are unsure of an identification we say so. Where a plant is rare or sensitive to trampling we describe the habitat rather than the exact location.
Where to look
The shoreline
Flat, windy, and far more varied than it looks from a car. The transition zone where the levee gravel meets the marsh holds gumplant, alkali heath and sea lavender well into the autumn, long after the hills have gone brown. Early morning is best; the wind picks up by ten and photographing anything becomes an exercise in patience.
The hills
Steeper ground dries faster, so the same species will finish two or three weeks earlier on a south-facing slope than on a north-facing one a hundred metres away. This is the single most useful thing to know when planning a walk. If you have missed a bloom, walk the shaded side.
Creek corridors
The richest ground, and the most fragile. Willow and buckeye shade keeps the soil damp, and there are species here you will find nowhere else nearby — several kinds of monkeyflower, and in a good year, chocolate lily. Stay on the path. The banks erode easily and recover slowly.
Reading the year
A wet November and December generally means a strong March. A dry autumn followed by heavy February rain gives a compressed, chaotic season in which everything appears at once and finishes within a fortnight. Neither is unusual, and both make a nonsense of fixed bloom calendars — which is why ours is written as a range rather than a date.
If you are new to this: bring a hand lens, not a camera. Most misidentifications happen because two similar flowers differ in a detail three millimetres across, and a phone photograph will not resolve it.
A note on collecting
Please don't. Seed collection from public land requires a permit, and the plants that most tempt people are usually the ones least able to spare the seed. Everything in this guide can be bought as nursery stock or grown from commercially available seed — see Growing Natives.
Corrections
We would rather be corrected than be wrong in public. If you think an identification here is mistaken, or you have bloom dates that contradict ours, we would like to hear about it. Records going back more than a few seasons are especially welcome.