Street Tree Project

I am quarantining with my girlfriend and my best friend, so my best friend and I went to Cuesta Canyon Park to enjoy some nature that's right in our backyard. It's about 1.2 miles from my girlfriend's apartment. The weather was just right for a visit to the park (Am I supposed to be narrating like an actual journal entry?).
Nonetheless, Kylie and I went to Cuesta Park because I am familiar with the area; last quarter I had to do a presentation about the upper-creek part of SLO's watershed for my environmental rhetoric class. To be honest, I already knew most of the trees in the park because of the presentation. I wanted to breeze through the observations because I simply wanted to spend time soaking up the sun while making daisy-chain crowns with my best friend.

The Bay Laurel seems to be the focus of the picture you get after descending the concrete steps. It's a BIG ole tree. It's limbs stretch out across the creek, dipping low to it's surface. There are a few other bay trees in the park, but this one is the most prominent.

The sycamores are abundant in the park, they are giants. I took a picture of a sapling for comparison, I guess. IF I had to choose one leaf to wipe with, it would be a Platanus racemosa leaf. It's big and soft. I know the wide shot of the willows is kinda shitty, but they form in clusters and have relatively thin branches. Even with the naked eye, willows are hard to distinguish. I did get pretty nice pics of their fuzzy seed pods though!

I messaged my wilderness friends for the plant ID for French Broom: some of them are majoring in fields where they'd know this sort of information. Others are simply nature enthusiasts. Annie Meeder responded with "f**king french broom. Genista monspessulana. It's super invasive." I'm not sure if it's a tree or a shrub, but I took pictures of it because it was intriguing. So I figured "hey, why not make an observation about it?"

I'm pretty confident in my ID of the Quercus agrifolia. It was growing on a fence, so maybe it could have been scrub oak. But the leaves were more lush than scrub oak. And I will NEVER mistake identifying Toyon. The serrated edges on this tree could make due for a small weapon. The one I'm not too sure about is the Peruvian pepper tree... I've never encountered it before, but the pictures iNaturalist provided for comparison looked like a match.

I met up with my best friend, who had been exploring and enjoying the creek while I ran about, snapping twigs and pictures. We sat on the great lawn that makes up a good portion of the back half of the park. I showed her my pictures and cuttings and told her about the constructed pools in the creek to help precipitate steel-head tout spawning. Then we made little flower crowns and bouquet out of those white flowers that often appear in grass fields.

Posted on April 20, 2020 10:38 PM by