We woke too late on Saturday to head for the desert, so we went the other way: out to the Pacific Coast Highway and up Topanga Canyon. Two years I’ve lived here and it’s less than twenty miles, and still I never made it there until this weekend. It was familiar nonetheless. Topanga Canyon and Big Sur, Davenport and Point Reyes, coastal California biomes seem all of them of a piece. Head north and one species wanes, another waxes. Hesperoyucca peters out and redwood takes its place, but the ground beneath them is recognizably the same country.
We passed the little town of Topanga, pleasant and self-consciously artisanal, and found a spot along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains. I walk into the range often enough, but in our neck of the woods the mountains are overrun with weeds: Cotoneaster, Pennisetum, red verbena in the wet winters. Where we stopped those weeds had been helpd back, native planted. Sharp-scented Salvia mellifera and its milder cousin the Cleveland sage; red gooseberry in flower and ceanothus with last year’s seeds as yet ungathered, toyon and coffeeberry. I worked with them every day a generation ago. I was surprised at how deeply I had missed them all. North of us lay the San Fernando Valley, filled to the rim with people. Beyond it the San Gabriels had lost their snow.
