Remembering Columbus

As you may have realized by the slightly reduced rush hour traffic today, today we are celebrating Columbus Day (aka Indigenous People’s Day).  In keeping with the holiday spirit, let’s contemplate what California landscapes looked like before European contact. After all, that’s how we define a native plant – something that was growing here the day before Columbus (or Francis Drake) got here. 

​It seems easy to know what California looked like before the Spanish got here – go to the foothills and hike far enough to where non-native weeds don’t yet have a foothold.  You’ll probably find a mosaic of waist to shoulder high aromatic shrubs – coastal sage scrub – or an impenetrable evergreen thicket – chaparral.  

​While this shows us what plants were there back in the day, it leaves a false impression of what pre-contact landscapes were like.      ​ ​

​Columbus, Drake and the rest did more than take make maps, trade trinkets, and take captives.  They also introduced their European microbes to a system where they had no natural enemies, introducing diseases that devastated the indigenous populations. 

As Kat Anderson’s Before the Wildneress explains, when John Smith or Junipero Serra arrived, they found a landscape that had been left to grow wild for over a century after the native population collapsed.  They saw an empty wilderness for the taking, not an abandoned garden.  

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​Before they were infected with the explorer's germs, Native Americans had been manipulating the landscape, burning the land to get fresh new growth to feed the game they hunted, trimming willows and sedges for basketry, irrigating desirable grasses for seeds, and promoting desired plants by selective cultivation and harvesting. Then plagues swept through the population, reducing both the need and the ability to continue altering the landscape to meet their needs.
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So as you putter in your garden, deadheading those dried seed heads from the buckwheat and sage, remember that you are continuing in a millennia-old gardening tradition.