Tending the Garden

Saint Francis watches over the winter garden at the Malibu Post. All photos @ 2016 S. Guldimann

“Neither need you tell me,” said Candide, “that we must take care of our garden.” 

“You are in the right,” said Pangloss; “for when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle.” 

“Work then without disputing,” said Martin; “it is the only way to render life supportable.”

—Voltaire, Candide 

While much of the country is gripped in the icy embrace of the polar vortex, the first rains of winter have already brought Malibu temporary relief from the blight of drought, and the first green flames of winter grass are kindling the barren earth. There is the tantalizing sense that Eden is somehow in reach here, no matter how long the exile from paradise. 

A buckeye butterfly rests on a strawflower in a Point Dume garden. 

All the bleak and dire news in the world can't diminish the hope that comes with the rain, and in our gardens we have a small but real opportunity for conservation and grassroots activism by providing safe earth-friendly habitat for wildlife, birds, butterflies, bees, and humans. 

Planting a butterfly garden now will ensure it is in bloom during peak butterfly season in the spring but will also help year-round pollinator species, including bees, make it through the winter.

Bees gather on a matillija poppy flower. Re-wilding gardens with native necter-producing flowers may be key to the survival of many species, including wild bees, honeybees, and the rapidly vanishing monarch butterfly, which depends entirely on milkweed for survival. The Malibu Monarch Project offers info on butterfly plants for the garden, so does the Xerces Society.

Many birds overwinter in Malibu. Providing a safe harbor with water and shelter for these seasonal residents is an easy and rewarding way to help conserve wildlife.

Supplying clean, safe water for birds is one of the most rewarding ways to help backyard birds. We have dozens of visitors to our birdbath, including this wrentit. Most birds prefer a wide, shallow basin. Here are some suggestions from the Cornell Bird Lab website. Some species are attracted to dripping water—easy to supply by poking a small hole in a bucket or even a plastic water bottle and suspending it over the bird bath. Here's some practical advice on how to do this from the San Francisco Gate.  

A large birdbath may attack bigger birds, like this mourning dove. We've had hawks stop by for a bath—water flies in all directions. A friend with a beach house regularly has sea gulls stop by to bathe. "We had to get a sturdier base," she told The Post. "They used to knock the old one over." All birds appreciate fresh, clean water. Regular draining and scrubbing can help prevent the spread of parasites or illness. Rocks or gravel can be used to raise the level of a deeper vessel, or to provide a "shallow end" for wildlife in a garden water feature. A "lizard ladder" is helpful for preventing accidental wildlife drownings. A piece of bamboo or just a fallen branch from a tree placed at an angle in the water is all that is needed.

Early winter is the best time to plant wildflower seeds, bare root trees, cool weather veggies like lettuce, as well as many native garden plants. It's also the safest time to trim trees—a window of opportunity that is relatively small, since owls, hawks, and ever squirrels begin nesting in late winter.

Winter is the safest time to trim trees in Malibu, but nesting season begins early here. I photographed this cozy tree-top nest and its gray squirrel architect last February.

Here at the Malibu Post we encounter at least ten species of raptors throughout the year, including white-tailed kites and on one memorable occasion a peregrine falcon. Red-tailed hawks like this one routinely nest in the neighborhood, so do red-shouldered hawks, American kestrels, barn owls, great horned owls, and western screech owls.

Barn owls are happy to set up shop in outbuildings or even attics, and great horned owls are opportunists who recycle the old nests of other raptors or crows in any tree, even sometimes palm trees, but western screech owls depend on native oaks for shelter. Property owners with room for oaks in their gardens have the opportunity to create habitat for a wide range of species.

Property owners who have room to plant oaks can help encourage oak-dependent native species like this acorn woodpecker.

Gardeners who would like to grow oaks can try their luck sprouting acorns. Native live oaks are easy to start this way, but all types of native oaks, even valley oaks, are easy to start in pots, as are California black walnuts and bay laurel. Just don't leave them in their pots too long. All three species depend on a deep taproot and won't thrive if that root doesn't have room to grow.

It's also a good time to try rooting cuttings or growing root divisions from local native plants. At the Malibu Post we've successfully rooted cuttings of mugwort, black and purple sage, buckwheat, ceanothus, penstemon, golden current, and toyon berry, and failed dismally at white sage; sagebrush; and Mexican elder.

A black sage sprig ready for planting, with the bottom two rows of leaves carefully removed. Black sage is a great garden plant, with aromatic leaves and blue flowers that attract butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds. It's also an interesting substitute for garden sage in the kitchen—a bit mintier and more pungent than the ordinary market variety. 

The cutting is planted in ordinary potting mix and gets lots of water—it is important to make sure the soil never dries out.

Once the cutting has taken root it can be transplanted into the ground, where if all goes well, it will grow into a plant like this.

Hummingbird sage, with its pineapple-scented leaves and beautiful purple flowers, grows well from root cuttings. So do corm-based blue-eyed grass, California native irises, and even some of our native ferns, like polypody and bracken.

Plant some wildflower seeds in an unused corner of the garden right now, and you may have a living tapestry there in the spring. This mix included poppies and owl clover.

Coyote brush, California bush sunflower, and laurel sumac—three critically important coastal sage scrub plants—readily grow from seed. So do many of our most beautiful wildflowers, including poppies, lupin and clarkia. 

Many rare and hard to propagate native species can be found at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley or at Bob Sussman's Matilija Nursery in Moorpark. It's worth a winter pilgrimage to both nurseries.

Not all native plants are hard to find. This Cleveland sage has become a garden favorite and is readily available. This plant came from Cosentino's Nursery here in Malibu. Local nurseries an often offer expert advice on the best plants for the area. In the rush to replace lawns with drought tolerant options many Malibu residents have inadvetantly turned their gardens into deserts. Grass is not ideal from a drought perspective but the right kind of grass and the right watering schedule can greatly reduce the amount of water a lawn requires. And unlike artificial grass or gravel, grass sequesters carbon, and if it isn't treated with pesticides provides habitat for a surprising number of invertebrates as well as the birds that feed on them. There's also been an alarming rush towards ripping out mature landscaping and replacing it was succulents, many of which are surprisingly toxic. You can read more here. Plants like pencil cactus, agave, and sego palm are popular because they are strikingly beautiful, but they can cause serious allergic reactions in humans and pets. A single sego palm seed can kill a large dog or a child.  

One of the most important contributions to the environment we can all make is eliminating toxic pesticides from our homes and gardens. Poison Free Malibu is working tirelessly to eliminate the deadliest wildlife-killing rodenticides—unfortunately found all over Malibu in bait boxes, but we can all help by excluding rodents, instead of poisoning them and making sure accidental food sources like garbage cans and pet food are cleaned up and secure. 

Eliminating herbicides like Roundup and toxic insecticides also helps every part of the local ecosystem, from soil organisms to bees and butterflies to humans and pets. Visit Poison Free Malibu's website for information and practical advice.

Birds depend on insects—especially caterpillars—as high-protein food for their young. If humans are willing to put up with a few creepy crawlers they can help hundreds of backyard species thrive.

The pocket gopher is probably the number one reason Malibu homeowners resort to outdoor use of rodenticides. And because this small rodent is the bottom of the food chain, poisoning this wee beastie causes secondary poisoning to every species that depends on rodents for prey, including owls, hawks, bobcats, raccoons, weasels, badgers, coyotes, mountain lions and domestic cats and dogs.

In a healthy ecosystem gophers are kept in check by all the species currently being poisoned by rodenticide overuse, like this benign gopher snake. 

Topanga recently became a National Wildlife Federation certified Wildlife Friendly Community. That's something Malibu could do, too. Leaving or creating  "wild" areas, and providing water and bird and butterfly friendly plants help create islands of habitat is even in the urban areas.

At the Malibu Post we have resident rabbits like this one, which lives in a brushy corner of the backyard, in addition to gray squirrels, dusky-footed wood rats, gophers, voles, and field mice. Wild visitors include a veracious gopher-eating short-tailed weasel, a family of bobcats, the entire east Point Dume coyote clan, and assorted raccoons, skunks, gray foxes and possums. We love all of our creatures, even the skunks, but realize that not everyone enjoys having backyard wildlife. Secure fencing that extends a couple of feet under ground is the best way to discourage visitors. Most species can fit through astonishingly small gaps in or under fencing. It's a good idea to check the fence line regularly, and make sure trees, bushes, or vines aren't creating a wildlife highway. One place no one wants wildlife is in the house. Sealing openings like the gaps around pipes and making sure all vents are screened with hardware cloth can help. 

Building or buying a bird box is a great way to help native birds We got this blue bird box last Christmas and were rewarded with not one but two successful batches of bluebirds during spring and summer. Location is extremely important for a bird box success story. This one was placed about six feet up the trunk of a liquidamber tree that offered the parent birds shelter and secure perching and vantage points as well as afternoon shade to keep the nestlings from overheating. If you're sure you live in a location where rodenticides aren't being used a raptor box can be a great addition to the garden.

Learning to live with wildlife, even the species we aren't always comfortable with, like coyotes, is a huge piece of the local environmental equation. Coyotes primarily prey on rodents like ground squirrels, gophers and wood rats and help control them. Learn more about coyote proof fencing and other coexistence techniques at coyoteproject.org. The Mountain Lion Foundation offers advice on dealing with Malibu's biggest urban predator.

You don't need a garden to tend to nature. All of the non- profits mentioned here depend on contributions. At Poison Free Malibu those donations help pay for ordinary but essential needs like printing and mailing. At Project Coyote  they help fund co-existance workshops and education outreach. Donations to the National Wildlife Federation can be earmarked to help save Malibu's mountain lions and build the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Overpass.

All Malibu residents are stewards of our natural resources, and we are blessed to have a national park as our backyard and the ocean at our door. Every canyon, every creek, every road leads to the sea. Malibu has a tradition of valuing those resources and our newly installed city council has vowed to protect them, but it's up to all of us to work together towards that goal.

Malibu residents often have the mountains or the ocean as their backyard. It's an extra responsibility for all of us but also one the great joys of living here. This remarkable group of sea birds includes two California brown pelicans, an adult Western gull, a juvenile Western gull and two ring-billed gulled, and they aren't out in the middle of some lonely stretch of unspoiled seashore. Instead, they're right here:

The fact that we still do have so much wildlife is a testament to our passionate conservation activists, who will continue to fight for the environment no matter what the odds.

There is still time to plant the seeds of tomorrow. For now, let's just enjoy the coming of the rain and the season of peace and joy and hope.

In the garden of my heart, the flowers of peace bloom beautifully.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, The Great Bell Chant, a Buddhist Prayer for the End of Suffering

The third annual Malibu Post calendar is now available for 2017. The calendars are 8.5 x 11 and feature 12 of our favorite Malibu Post photos from 2016 printed on heavy photo stock and spiral bound, for $14.95 plus sales tax. We will gladly accept cash or checks. Shipping is $4. Free delivery to your door in the 90265 area code. Orders can be placed using the contact form in the right column.

Stormy Weather

The sun breaks through the clouds at Zuma Beach, signaling the end of three days of rain. Malibu received much-needed rain and sustained comparatively little damage during the extended deluge. © 2014 S. Guldimann

Rain at last. My mother and I went down to Westward Beach on Thursday at sunset to watch the rain arrive. The sky was pearl gray and tranquil, the ocean calm. Everything was strangely quiet, as if holding its breath.

There's a feeling of community at the beach most evenings. Locals and visitors gather to watch the sunset. People walk dogs, runners run, children try to wheedle another 10 minutes on the beach from parents, surfers gather for a last wave if the surf is good, or to commiserate when it isn't. Sometimes you see old friends. Sometimes the Rock Man is there, burning white sage in an old abalone shell, "calling" the whales and the dolphins. If he's in the mood, he might tell you stories. 

There were no whales, no surfers, no storytellers on Thursday, but we met a friend, braving the weather to walk her dogs. We stood together for a while watching the light fade and the fog roll in.

Rain rolls across the horizon at Westward Beach on Thursday evening. © 2014 S. Guldimann

Far out over the ocean wild geese fly low, reflecting a second, illusionary flock in the still water. Their voices carried to shore, faint but clear. © 2014 S. Guldimann

On Wednesday, two gray whales, a dozen dolphins and the entire Point Dume sea lion colony were out at sunset. Only a lone dolphin was visible on Thursday, ahead of the storm. © 2014 S. Guldimann

 According to the garden rain gauge, we had a total of 4.5 inches of rain on Point Dume. A friend up in the Santa Monica Mountains reported 6 inches. © 2014 S. Guldimann

The rain arrived slow and sleepy and first, then fierce and strong, driven by wicked winds. It ended as meekly as it arrived. The deluge turned to drizzle on Sunday afternoon and almost imperceptibly faded away.

The oak titmouse, silent for three days, materialized at the top of the willow tree and sang a triumphant trill. As if that was the signal, birds appeared all over the garden. The crows went back to the difficult task of selecting the right twigs for their nests, and the dog, who is convinced he will melt if he goes out in the rain, was encouraged to venture into the garden.

The tree frogs are singing. Even the secretive California toad is whistling a few tentative notes, like a singer warming up for a solo. It's been a tough year for Malibu's amphibian population, but three days of almost non-stop rain appears to have done wonders. 

This tiny Baja California tree frog—formerly known as a the Pacific tree frog, but now dignified with the name Pseudacris hypochondriaca hypochondriaca—has a mighty song. This one has taken up residence in a backyard rain barrel, and fills the garden with his distinctive voice. Greatly emboldened by the wet weather, he's been out during the day, singing in the rain with all the enthusiasm of Gene Kelly. You don't need to live in tree frog country to be familiar with the sound. It's a ubiquitous part of old movie soundtracks, used by foley artists to evoke the ambience of summer nights, steamy swamps, tropical jungles,and  picturesque bayous, even when Pacific tree frogs have no business in any of those settings. © 2014 S. Guldimann

It's easy to mistake the California toad's melodic peeping for the call of a small bird. This is Bufo boreas halophilus. The California Herps website (one of the best places on the Internet for all kinds of information on local reptiles and amphibians) says that this species is diurnal and nocturnal, but while I've heard toads calling during the day, I've only ever seen them at night, even during wet weather when they are more active. You can hear their song here. © 2014 S. Guldimann

Not everything that emerges in the garden after the rain is welcome. Here's a newly-hatched specimen of that monstrous, unstoppable alien invader known as the common garden snail, looking remarkably dainty and delicate as it wreaks havoc on the flowers. I don't mind. Not today. © 2014 S. Guldimann

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head

With silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools in the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song 

on our roof at night—
And I love the rain. 

— Langston Hughes

Waiting for the Rain

Malibuites have watched storm clouds roll past all winter, bringing dramatic sunsets, but little measurable rain. This storm brought the first real rain of 2014. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

"California's very existence is premised on epic liberties taken with water..."

—Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert

It rained last week. On Point Dume, we had a third of an inch. It’s not much, but it's enough to keep at least some seeds of hope alive. Back in January, I wrote a short article for the Malibu Surfside News on local drought history. Here’s a more in-depth look at the pattern of droughts and floods that has shaped the landscape of Malibu.

Until the recent rains in Northern California, the media had a field day with dire predictions that this will be the worst drought in California history, or at least the worst since the drought of 1977 or the dry spell that lasted from 1944-51. However, the historical record shows numerous severe drought periods in the 19th century, before “official” scientific records were kept. Drought impacted Southern California in 1863, 1871, 1877, and 1897, and those drought periods arguably changed the course of history in Malibu.

Malibu Rancho ranch hands brand cattle at Zuma in 1897, the year of a major Southern California drought that affected the Malibu Rancho and much of the West.

Frederick Hastings Rindge, who bought the entire Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit from the Keller family in 1892, provides a grim description of historic drought in his book Happy Days in Southern California, published in 1898:  

 “There was a dry time in 1863, another in 1877, and in 1897 there was a great drought. In November, 1863, there was a regular downpour, and it did not rain again until November, 1864 ; and in consequence, dead cattle covered the ground from Monterey to Southern California. Abel Stearns' losses in cattle were enormous. The year 1877 was very dry. In Santa Barbara County, hay was forty dollars a ton. I have heard men say, with a sigh, ‘It was the dry year of ’77 that broke me up. My sheep all died.’ Many a man grew gray that year, as he saw his living withering away.”

Raindrops from the first real rain of the year in Malibu collect on a yucca leaf. Even California's specialized, drought-adapted native plants are suffering from the extended lack of rain this year. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

The Report of the Agricultural Commissioner for the Year 1874 gives a less poetic but equally bleak account of the earlier 1871 drought:

“During the three years from 1868 to 1871, south of Monterey neither grass nor grain grew...Hundreds of farms were abandoned, and the stock-men were compelled to drive their cattle, horses, and sheep to the gulches of the mountains, not only for food, but for water. In February, 1870, not a blade of grass was to be seen over the extensive valley of the Santa Clara; and the broad plains of Los Angeles, covering over 1,000,000 acres of arable land, were nearly desolate, even to the borders of the streams...In March, 1871, the usual season when the crops should be luxuriant, not a blade of grass was to be seen over the great plains and through the valleys, which are richly covered after favorable rains. Hundreds of thousands of sheep, horses, and cattle were lost by starvation.”

Rindge also wrote of his own experiences with drought in 1897:

“Alas! Alas! The dry year is upon us. The very air seems oppressed and oppressing. The very air seems oppressed and oppressing. It is a battle to feel cheerful when Nature is sad. One's nervous system loses its elasticity, and it is hard to do vigorous work. Indeed, this may be the effect of the mind upon the body : the mind being burdened with distress, the body responds sympathetically. The sombre fields look sad and discouraged. The wild flowers are not "in tune," but lie late, sleeping silently in the seeds ; the poppy fields are silent and sad, though next year they will awake in their glory. The cows, with mournful pity, look upon their shrunken-sided calves ; the mothers eat even the leaves, but alas ! they make but little milk. The goats drop their young before time, in the foothills, for lack of nourishment to support their growth. Dejection is on every side. Even the good spirit of the blue jay seems lacking, under the relentless skies.

In this 'day of grief and desperate sorrow,' what shall we do but trust in God ? Our cattle and horses have death before them. The little lambs lie dead about the corral and on the hills, the ewes being milkless. To pay the pasturage on alfalfa farms would cost more than the stock is worth."

Rain from the recent storm system that brought a deluge to much of Northern and Central California failed to make landfall in the south, although there was rain out to sea off the coast of Malibu. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

Rindge gives an account of horrific loss of livestock:

 “Word came from Ventura today that a man up the valley had shot all his range horses rather than see them die, for he could not sell them. Another rancher, with a flock of seven thousand sheep, has found it necessary to kill two thousand young lambs, in order to save the lives of the mother sheep. They are taking horses to the soap-works, and selling them at two dollars and a half. The hide is worth a dollar and a half, the tail fifty cents, and the balance is valuable for soap and land dressing. Some cannot pay their interest, and the mortgage is foreclosed. Others, more prudent, rejoice that they had kept to the motto their parents taught them, ‘Out of debt, out of danger.’” 

“Happy and wise is the man who has settled by a water-course, who owns a never failing spring, or whose wind-mill is above real water-bearing ground. The streams never were so low. They sink before they reach the sea…”

Vegetation burned in the 2013 Spring Fire last year hasn't received enough rain yet to begin the process of recovery and regrowth. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

“The drought of 1898 was, if possible, more devastating in its effects than previous droughts except that of 1862-1864,” states an article entitled “California’s Cattle Range Industry: Decimation of the Herds, 1870-1912, published in the Journal of San Diego History in 1965. 

“Reports of county assessors indicate a reduction in number of cattle in the entire state from 487,742 in 1898 to 463,536 the next year,” the article states. “The president of the State Board of Agriculture, however, reported that actual losses were much greater than the assessor's reports revealed. A contemporary remarked that the drought of 1898 was ‘the means of crippling the cattle business greatly in California.’"

The 1877 drought reportedly drove the previous Malibu Rancho owner, Matthew Keller, to abandon plans to plant extensive vineyards and other crops. Keller bought the ranch in 1857 and spent the next 15 years fighting a legal battle for title to the land. He received the patent in 1872,  at the end of the devastating three-year drought.

 At his extensive farm acreage in Los Angeles, Keller experimented with cotton, castor beans, and citrus, in addition to raising grapes for his successful Rising Sun and Los Angeles Vineyard, which produced wine, sherry and brandy. Keller eventually planted a vineyard at Solstice Canyon, one of the few local canyons with reliable year-round water, but large-scale plans for Malibu never materialized and he leased most of the property to neighboring cattle and sheep ranchers for grazing range. Today, all that remains in Malibu of Keller's legacy is the Rising Sun Trail in Solstice Canyon, named for his 19th century vineyard.

Much of the livestock that grazed in Malibu belonged to ranchers on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, including the areas that are now Newbury Park, Thousand Oaks and Westlake in the Conejo Valley. The 1877 drought decimated cattle and sheep population and left many ranchers bankrupt.

Egbert Starr Newbury purchased a portion of  the former Rancho El Conejo land grant in the early 1870s, but had to abandon his Newbury Park Ranch following the devastating 1877 drought. This is an archival photo of an old Newbury Park Ranch barn. While we have little information on the effect of drought on the Malibu Rancho in 1900s, accounts from Conejo Valley on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, paint a grim picture of this period in local history.

 “Up until the drought years of 1876 and 1877, the Conejo [Valley] was covered in vegetation, feeding thousands of roaming sheep and livestock,” wrote Jeffrey Wayne Maulhardt in the introduction to his book Images of America: Conejo Valley. Maulhardt puts the pre-drought count at nearly 20,000 sheep. At the end of the drought period “a few thousand emaciated sheep worth 10 cents a head remained.”

The drought cost many Conejo Valley farmers their farms. Civil War veteran Egbert Starr Newbury, who homesteaded Newbury Park and built the first post office in the Conejo Valley, lost everything in the 1877 drought. He wasn’t alone. Howard Mills, one of the first land speculators in the area,  bought 20,000 acres in 1873, including  the 6000 acres that he named  Triunfo Ranch and that is now Westlake Village. The 1877 drought drove Mills to bankruptcy.

Mathew Keller died in 1881 and his family sold the entire Malibu Rancho to Rindge, who continued to run cattle, but as a hobby, not for a living. Later ranchers, including the Kincaid family in Trancas Canyon and the Roberts Ranch in Solstice Canyon also ran cattle, but on a more modest scale. Fire followed the 1897 drought in 1903, burning much of Malibu. The 1945-51 drought was followed by a catastrophic fire in 1956 that put an end to the last remnants of the Malibu ranch tradition. 

County water arrived throughout much of Malibu following World War II, bringing more intensive development, but the cycle of drought, and the wildfires that accompany it, still impact residents directly, and water remains a critical issue in the areas of Malibu that still depend on wells. Only a small fraction of Malibu's population would able to live in Malibu if the community depended on groundwater, and the current craze for vineyards combined with the lasting drought is reportedly already impacting areas of the Santa Monica Mountains where homeowners are increasingly finding themselves competing with viticulture for well water.

An aerial view of the eastern end of the 1956 fire, dated 1956-12-27, from the Los Angeles Examiner Negatives Collection at USC. The fire followed an extended period of drought from 1944-51. The 1978 fire took the same route to the sea and also followed a period of extreme drought.

The 2007 Corral Fire, sweeping down the canyon towards the sea on the same trajectory as the 1956 fire, above, and the 1978 fire. This photo was taken from Point Dume just before dawn on the first day of the fire. The white lights are homes, The red lights are the fire engines. Photo © 2014 S. Guldimann

This is an archival photo from the old Malibu Surfside News of Topanga Canyon during the floods of 1979-1980. The pattern of drought, fire and flood is familiar to anyone who has lived in Malibu for any length of time.

Predictions continue to indicate extended dry weather across Southern California this winter but longtime residents still recall that the 1977 drought was followed, first by the 25,000-acre 1978 Kanan Dume Fire and then by the floods of 1979-80 that damaged more than 100 homes, transformed dry creek beds into raging rivers, and buried a section of PCH under thousands of cubic feet of mud and rock.  It's a pattern that has repeated many times. In fact, the 1863 drought was preceded by the great flood of 1862, when it reportedly rained for 45 days in a row, flooding the entire West Coast, from the Columbia River in Oregon to Northern Mexico.

There's no surviving record of how the great flood of 1862 affected Malibu, but here's a charming litho of Sacramento, transformed into "a second Venice." The flood, also known as the Noachian Deluge, was no joke, it bankrupted the state. Almost the entire Central Valley was transformed into a temporary inland sea. In Southern California, the town of Ventura had to be abandoned, residents scrambled for high ground as the river rose and kept on rising. Los Angeles was hammered with 35 inches of rain. The L.A. River, reportedly clogged with debris that included entire houses and hundreds of drowned cows and sheep, turned much of the L.A. Basin into a vast, shallow lake. 

“No other city seems to excite such dark rapture,” wrote Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, a 1998 chronicle of the numerous disasters, real and fictional, afflicting the Los Angeles area. The book includes Davis' infamous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” And yet, many who live here love this place fiercely and are willing to endure all of the extremes in exchange for a chance to experience what Frederick Hastings Rindge described as “very near terrestrial paradise,” even when that paradise is tempered by the extremes of flood, fire and drought.

"Old Growth," one of a series of paintings by the author inspired by California's turbulent,  disaster-prone—and often lunatic—history. Artwork © 2014 S. Guldimann

This was the summer when I came to know,

After long years,

My love for these brown hills,

And learned the peace

Their stony harshness brings,

And felt their beauty singing in my blood.

Now in October, warm and dusty-hazed,

“I wait serenely for the winter rains

To fill the parched and stony waterways,

Knowing that Spring will follow

In a blaze—

Green fire of grass,

Blue flame of lupin bloom,

And poppies burning on the bare hillsides.

—Madeleine Ruthven, 1934