“The chaparral species depend on fire,” Presley said. The last fire in the area was in 1923, and over 80 years the canyons flourished with tinder, overrun by aggressive invasive grasses and manzanita bushes stretching twenty feet to the sky. “When you have a chaparral environment, which is very dry and can seem very harsh, it’s very striking when you have flowers that are delicate and have large, showy petals.” Hillman’s favorite flowers that have risen from Croy’s ashes are the bush and fire poppies. “I think it’s very happy growing there in all the open space.” “When we found it growing on Croy, it was very vigorous, which is unusual,” Hillman said. “They aren’t good competitors and a fire opens up space for them.”Īmong the unusual native species growing in the burn area are yerba santa, Hoffman’s sanicle, the Santa Cruz County monkey flower and Brewer’s calandrina, a fleshy plant with red flowers. “It’s either because no one noticed them or the fire created a lack of competition that allowed the plants to get established,” Hillman said. District Botanist Janell Hillman said many of the species are uncommon and were unseen before the fire. The canyons are now blanketed with fire-followers, plants that thrive with fire or take advantage of open space. Without intense heat to melt the cones of the knobcone pine, they won’t regerminate.

And the canyons are coated with baby knobcone pines standing just a foot or two off the ground.Ĭhaparral species are fire-adapted, meaning they actually need the destructive heat of a wildfire to fuel their life cycle. What from a distance look like fields of common, invasive broom species from France and Scotland are actually yellow bush poppies, a chaparral plant. And most importantly, those plants are native species.

French broom in santa cruz ca