Driving Interstate 5 through the Central Valley can be a bleak experience, especially during late summer. When I took the trip one day last August, the eastern slope of the Diablo Range hills wore the depressing brown of worn out annual grasses. Here and there grew occasional morning glories, tenacious despite that their white petals and gray-green leaves lay covered in dust. A few sunflowers sprouted from disturbed soils along the shoulder, and everywhere a barbed wire fence was stretched, legions of tumbleweeds lay strewn together along its line. Green-leaved almond and citrus orchards often alleviated the bleakness of the terrain. But looking at them, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how in 1966 Joan Didion characterized a lemon grove in the San Bernardino Valley as something unnatural in arid terrain: “sunken down a three-or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare” (5). I wasn’t perched on a retaining wall, but sitting in an air conditioned vehicle flying by at 70 mph. Still unsettling.
But it hasn’t always been so, and often still isn’t. Take the same route in spring, and the annual grasses cover the hills adjacent to the freeway in a carpet of lush green stretching out beneath clear blue but sometimes rain-laden gray skies. Then you don’t even mind very much that a rather ugly Amazon fulfillment center pushes a pretty big footprint into the cultivated landscape to the east of the California Aqueduct. Both are impressive examples of human engineering and logistics, just as are the orchards and fields throughout the valley, made possible by a legacy of water projects, railroads, electrical lines, highways, and the Public Land Survey grid. It’s the grid that gives much of the Valley its checkerboard veneer, often marking properties that settlers once claimed from the public domain via homestead or preemption. As consumers we live off this legacy, even as year by year it feels ever more unsustainable.
The Central Valley really comprises two valleys, the San Joaquin Valley to the south and the Sacramento Valley to the north, each drained by major rivers that come together to form the Sacramento Delta. In places, the Central Valley can stretch up to 75 miles across between the Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada Range. Within are grasslands, riparian forests, tule marshes, chaparral, desert, and, of course farmland and ranchland, acres almost too vast to count. And before all this development, usually near reliable sources of water, indigenous people—among them the Wintu, Yokuts, Miwok—lived here. And despite the depredations of European and American colonialism, many still do. Just take a look at Native Lands Digital’s impressive “Our Home on Native Land Map.”
And there were wildflowers. Astonishing wildflowers.
In 1868, John Muir—a Scot who as a boy came to the United States with his family—arrived aboard a ship in San Francisco, from where he was determined to hike to Yosemite Valley. Already a seasoned walker—he had already walked 1000 miles from Kentucky to Florida, the subject of his book A Thousand-Mile Hike to the Gulf—he set off with a companion along a route that took them south through the Santa Clara Valley and to Pacheco Pass. Muir would eventually become one of California’s preeminent nature writers as well as an effective conservation activist. As biographer Donald Worster writes of the traveling companions: “They descended cool ravines crowded with ferns and rushing streams, climbed grassy slopes dotted with live oaks, hiking up and down and up again. At last they stood looking eastward across the sun-filled Central Valley. . . ” (150). Later, Muir would describe his first view of the Sierra Nevada—and the Central Valley—this way:
. . . the Central Valley, but little trampled or plowed as yet, was one furred, rich sheet of golden compositae, and the luminous wall of the mountains shone in all its glory. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. (Mountains)
The focus of Muir’s delight, of course, was the mountain range rising from the eastern edge of the Valley. But those of us used to navigating Pacheco Pass into the Valley might not believe Muir’s description. Today, Highway 152 snakes around the San Luis Reservoir to Highway 33, which heads north toward the faux Scandinavian kitsch of Pea Soup Andersen’s. The idea of a valley carpeted with golden wildflowers seems hardly imaginable. And it’s not like Muir’s enthusiasms don’t occasionally come with a sort of weird, hyperbolic romanticism. This is a guy who happily described the 1872 Owens Valley Earthquake—estimated to have been a whopping 7.4-7.9 moment of magnitude monster that rearranged parts of the Sierra on both sides of the crest—as “A noble earthquake!” (National Parks 262).
Muir wasn’t done describing the botanical wonders of the Central Valley. In “The Bee Pastures”—a chapter of his first book The Mountains of California and based on an 1882 The Century Magazine essay—he offers a vibrant, more particular description of the plush botanical carpet covering the Valley floor:
The Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias [sic], and innumerable compositae were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine per cent. of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky—one sheet of purple and gold, with the bright Sacramento pouring through the midst of it from the north, the San Joaquin from the south, and their many tributaries sweeping in at right angles from the mountains, dividing the plain into sections fringed with trees. (Mountains 339)
It’s tempting to put down to hyperbole the description Muir offers, even considering the qualification he offers by reminding us that the Valley was “but little trampled or plowed.” But another writer, using what I imagine to be a pseudonym—“Ralph Rambler”—offers a description consistent with Muir’s, one that offers contemporary readers another astonishing scene.
Appearing in 1872 in the Pacific Rural Press (a San Francisco magazine featuring agricultural subjects), Rambler’s essay had appeared before Muir’s, but his description of botanical bounty is pleasingly consistent, though a tad less artistic and a bit more mannered, with the descriptions offered by John of the Mountains. Tellingly, the same caveat appears: Wherever the plowshare has not lately turned the fertile soil, and where the rank grain is not waving in a [sic] unbroken surface of green, the native sod is densely studded with varied flowers of almost every hue —some of unsurpassed beauty and fragrance.
This caveat is preface to a long list of San Joaquin Valley flowers that Rambler enumerates, astonishing variety for those of us used to valley pastures and ranches, and the built environment—freeways, railroads, power lines, and water projects—that support the Valley and, indeed, the entire state:
Come then, let us Ramble Together, and as a pastime and pleasure, let us study and chronicle the names of some of our floral beauties, before they shall have passed away. For even though, dear reader, none of these flowers shall finally perish to be seen no more, the spring-time will soon end, the rains will cease, the plains now so richly carpeted, will then be dry and sere, and our wild flowers will leave us, until another spring, like a resurrection morn, shall bring them again to beautify and cheer our way. And let us take the children with us in our rambles, for they all love flowers, and can learn some useful lessons from their study. What then are the Flowers That most attract the eye on our sandier, or lighter soils? They are the orange-colored poppy, blue and pink lupines, lovegroves, bluebells, the painted-cup, or, as it might be very suitably named, princess’ plume, the flax-flower, wild chrysanthemum, star-thistle, milk-weed, dandelion, lark spurs, evening-primroses, and several others worthy of record, but which as yet unfortunately have no common English name, such as the white collinsia, the purple calandrinia, the lilac-colored phacelia, and the two species of gilia.
Decades later, despite the ever-growing agricultural footprint, poet William Elizabeth McDaniel still appreciated the emotional impact of Central Valley wildflowers, especially when their appearance was unexpected. McDaniel, says scholar Jan Goggans, arrived in the Central Valley from Oklahoma when she was 17 and began writing soon after. She lived mostly in Tulare, in the San Joaquin Valley, and didn’t begin publishing her work until she was 50. Goggans writes that “McDaniel understood the Central Valley as a place in which nature and culture intervened, with ecstatic and tragic outcomes” (302). In “First Spring in California, 1936” she perfectly evokes the ecstatic surprise felt by destitute Oklahoma migrants suddenly confronted by unlooked for golden wildflowers:
As they waited for odd jobs the Valley burst forth with one imperial color poppies flung their gold over acres of sand like all the bankers in California gone raving mad Women wept in wonder and hunted fruit jars to can the precious flowers in case next year did not produce a bumper crop
The implicit tension between “all the bankers in California” and the migrant workers waiting for odd jobs is movingly emphasized by the “imperial color” of the poppies, whose gold is not the coin of the capitalist but the wonder triggered by the “precious flowers” experienced by working people. Bankers don’t get to feel the emotional satisfaction of unexpectedly finding something so precious. I think here at least McDaniel outranks Muir for the emotional wallop she evokes writing about California wildflowers.
Much of the Central Valley is arid, which speaks to our senses as we travel much of its landscape. That is why agriculture there depends on impressive irrigation systems which water the vast checkerboard of farm and ranch lands. But despite the development of the Valley’s vast infrastructure—which reaches back into the nineteenth century and includes much more than water projects—wildflowers still bloom. Just check out the myriad observations in the Calflora database. Search by place, say Tulare County where McDaniel lived, and you’ll find that the California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) is still found throughout the county as are many other California native (and some non-native) plants; in fact, 2,219 species, according to Calflora’s “What Grows Here” feature.
So it’s heartening to see that that wild flora is not all gone. And maybe first-person literary descriptions—from John Muir, “Ralph Rambler,” and Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, among others—can help us to better appreciate the significance of changes that have been brought to the Valley and that we largely take for granted.
Sources:
“Blooming Hills” by Demi Lucas is licensed under CC By Attribution 3.0 Unported. Accessed 5 October 2022.
Calflora Database. https://www.calflora.org. Accessed 6 October 2022.
Didion, Joan. “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968, pp. 3-28.
Goggans, Jan. “Nature Meets Culture in California’s Central Valley.” Western American Literature, vol. 52 no. 3, 2017, p. 297-305. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/wal.2017.0052. Accessed 18 September 2022.
McDaniel, Wilma Elizabeth. “First Spring in California, 1936.” A Prince Albert Wind. Mother Road Publications, 1994, p. 31.
Muir, John. “The Bee Pastures of California.” The Century Magazine, Vol. 24, June/July. I https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x002529972&view=1up&seq=400. Accessed 3 October 2022.
—. The Mountains of California. The Century Company, 1894. https://books.google.com/books?id=iXQQAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=muir+mountains+of+california&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiQqKPssJT6AhVuMEQIHbfcBSAQ6AF6BAgKEAI#v=onepage&q=muir%20mountains%20of%20california&f=false. Accessed 14 September 2022.
Native Lands Digital. “Our Home on Native Land Map.” https://native-land.ca. Accessed 11 October 2022.
—. Our National Parks. Houghton, Mifflin, 1901. https://books.google.com/books?id=D_Z1AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=our+national+parks+muir&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjh6tbht8T6AhWRLkQIHeY7AXoQ6AF6BAgHEAI#v=onepage&q=our%20national%20parks%20muir&f=false. Accessed 3 October 2022.
Rambler, Ralph. “The Wildflowers of San Joaquin Valley.” Pacific Rural Press. Vol. 4, No. 1, 6 July 1872, p. 3. UCR California Digital Newspaper Collection. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=PRP18720706.2.6.2&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–1. Accessed 15 September 2022.
Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Oxford U P, 2008.
“1872 Owens Valley Earthquake.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1872_Owens_Valley_earthquake. Accessed 3 October 2022.
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