All Hail the Plant Kingdom

Sometimes even the best laid plans are swept aside. We had intended to stay here in California, in Pismo Beach, until December. We have a vacation home to Louisville coming up and even with that Maya was going to be done with this assignment on December 20. Then we would have gone to see family in L. A. for the holidays and picked up her next assignment in January. It was a great plan. We like it here, October is suppose to be the nicest month here on the Central Coast, having the holidays off was going to be great. Then it was all swept away. The hospital here decided that it didn’t need as many travelers as they had after all and cancelled the contracts of Maya and one other lady. So now we are moving. And soon! We found this out very early in September with her last scheduled day as September 20. While we waiting to find out what other jobs were available, we looked for some fun things to do a little closer to home.

Since we had enjoyed the Botanic Garden in Santa Barbara so much we looked for some other places like that. It turns out that the local college in SLO, California Polytechnic (known as Cal Poly), has its own arboretum. On the first Saturday in September we went up to the Leaning Pine Arboretum.

It is really more than an arboretum as there a lot more than trees there. There are all kinds of plants from all over the world. Every place in the world that is close to 30 degrees (north or south), and is on a western coast has a similar climate. Leaning Pine has plants from all these places. Western Australia, South Africa, the Mediterranean basin, Chile and of course California are all represented. They were all arranged in groups by county or by type of plant with many informational signs interspersed.

Matt was sort of crazy about how neat the place was. He just kept talking about what a discovery this place was and how it would be great to come back if we were going to be around longer. Maya said that it seems like the kind of place that would fill up with studying students at test time. Every college campus should have a well manicured and well landscaped garden of familiar and exotic plants to study in. Of course, only a school with a massive agricultural department (as Cal Poly has) could actually support such an endeavor.
Two days later, continuing our plant kick we went to a tiny state reserve called Los Osos Oaks. Matt has been wanted to go since we first got here to California. It is a little bit of forest that has never been developed. The groves of costal oaks used to be more wide-spread but most of the rest were cut down for timber or to make pasture-land. Some of the oaks in this particular grove are estimated at 800 years old. Since they are growing in the relatively poor soil of ancient sand dunes they are dwarfed and twisted. It was quite other-worldly to walk through such a tangled mess of trees.

The only down-side of the place is that as a preserve it is not at all developed. This extends to the so-called trails. There are places where the path is entirely unclear or where it branches numerous times in short order. All the paths seem to lead into deeper and deeper lost recesses of the forest. It’s great to wonder in, but a little daunting when you know you want to leave again sometime. There were quite a few moments when we were not certain of the correct path and a couple of these were almost scary. We did make it back out of the woods without incident, however. It is quite a nice little group of trees and quite a nice little hike.