Disturbed Earth: Sweet and Piquant

[ritaxis]

The apple orchards on Calabasas road are blooming -- not the trees, the ground: acid yellow sourgrass and bright yellow mustard. The mustard is the same mustard as you buy in the jar in the store (that is to say the mustard is several of the same species -- there's pages and pages of them in Jepson alone). Roadsides are blooming in honey-scented alyssum and ceanothus.
The garden writer in the Sentinel today called ceanothus "the queen of disturbed earth." Wherever there's a fire or a landslide, ceanothus is one of the pioneering plants, and it serves the land well: its roots prevent further erosion, and there's some indication they also fix nitrogen. It acts as a nursery for trees (as does poison oak, another member of the disturbed earth oligarchy).
Disturbed earth is what we are in California. We are the mustard, immigrant and feeling native, bright and piquant and pushy, urban and rural without distinction.

Okay, that's kind of pretentious. Oh well.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Oh, they're all the same. There's probably a poisonous brassica somewhere, but I haven't met one. But all the mustards are brassica sp -- brassica nigra or brassica rapa or, in the case of mustard greens, brassica juncea. But you can eat very very young wild mustard as greens (it gets tough and rasty pretty quick) Most of the things that are cauliflower-broccoli-cabbage-etc are brassica oleracea, but some are other things, or hybrids with other things, or are confusing.

Brassicaceae is the family to have for dinner.