The Country Mouse and Wood Rat establishment is just a bit south-west of the square thingy that's above Scotts Valley on the map. The map includes Ms Town mouse's locale, which lies between Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. As you can see, Ms Town lives on the other side of the Coast Range from me, in one of the pleasant suburbs that spread along the flat-bottomed Santa Clara Valley.
Our home (shown in the image I cut out of Google Earth) is on a sunny ridge about 6.5 miles north of the Monterey Bay, and 900 feet above sea level, on the south-eastern flank of the Santa Cruz Mountains, which protect Santa Clara Valley from much, though not all, of the marine influence we feel much more strongly.We get our share of fog here in winter; but we are fortunate (I think) to live in a "Coast Range Thermal Belt," which is why we are in Sunset Zone 16: hotter and drier in summer than you might expect, not quite so cold in winter. Lower, shadier locations not two miles from our home are in the more typical coastal zone, zone 17, cooler and more foggy. We can see Monterey Bay when it's clear. Sometimes white fog fills its basin like whipped cream, and creeps up the valleys to engulf us, and sometimes we are totally enveloped in low clouds. But generally it's sunny all summer long.
Our zones are the same, but my soil is also different from Tmouse's soil. Her soil is probably alkaline, deep and clayey. Rich but lacking in air spaces. Mine tends to be acidic, sandy, and thin where there are no trees to provide humus. California natives that like fast draining soil grow here.
Where TMouse has a large garden by suburban standards, we have a small lot by mountain standards: officially just under three acres. But it feels like an endless universe to me. I never would have guessed I would ever own such a property, not in my wildest dreams.
The Google image reveals that the "garden" areas of our property, close to the buildings, are not - ahem - very well developed as yet. I need help with design. But I also have control issues! Result: planting paralysis. More on that in another post maybe. I'm more focused on eradication of invasives, managing the fuel load, and propagation of local natives. But I would like a pretty garden one day.
In the photo you can see the chamise chaparral that lies to the south. The part across the road is on our property too - I'm not really sure where it ends. We haven't disturbed it and may not. On the house side of the road you can see where we have been thinning, taking out most of the chamise, and all the dead wood, as is recommended for fire safety. The photo shows how it looked last year. That area is almost completely thinned now.
There are also open spots now in the wooded areas on the northern facing slope, where the bay tree and eucalyptus were removed this spring. I wonder when that will show up on Google Earth. The northern slope has redwood and mixed-evergreen forest habitats with beautiful toyon, madrone, Douglas fir, and, of course, redwoods.
Las Pilitas has us wrong, in terms of their Communities by Zipcode feature. They say we should have Mixed Evergreen Forest, which we do, and Coastal Sage Scrub, which we we don't. We have Chamise Chaparral. Artemisia californica, California Sagebrush, grows nearby, but not on our property or the areas adjacent. Mother nature is messier than the botanist's neat schemes. Some plants common to both sage scrub and chaparral grow here, like monkey flower, and manzanita, but it's too hot and dry here in summer, I think, for the sage scrub habitat to take hold. Las Pilitas doesn't mention the redwoods either, that cover much of the shady slopes.
But I don't exectly know the history of this spot yet. At some point before this land was divided up into lots for wilderness homes, it was a "ranch." The old name still hangs from a disused farm gate at the end of our road. I would love to know what the rancher did up here, how much of the land was left in its original state, and how much was cleared - probably for orchards or grazing for animals - and then returned to the wild later, or turned into vineyards, a common use for land around here. Maybe there was sage scrub here, and it got converted to chamise chaparral through human intervention? I'd love to find out.
I'm thinking about history lately because I've been dipping into the books I splurged on, in a recent University of California Press sale. (I went there for Jepson, of which more anon, and ended up buying many more books!)
One of my purchases was A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, the memoir of Mary Hallock Foote. She was a published writer and illustrator, an Easterner who came west with her engineer husband in the late 1870s. But even though she lived in the "far west" for most of her adult life, she never did feel at home here.
Curious, I read her short story, "In Exile," because it is set near here, and is based on her experiences living in the community that sprang up around the New Almaden Quicksilver Mine, just south of San Jose. (It's now the Almaden Quicksilver County Park, with a great museum and wonderful hiking.)
I was so surprised by the attitude of the characters in her story, the "exiles" filled with longing for their cultured eastern homes, and dislike of the arid California climate and landscape. Well, of course things are less rough-and-ready around here now. No lack of culture. Plus - the Internet! But it did make me realize how differently I feel.
How can I not feel that this is where I'm planted, amid this cornucopia of flora and fauna that spills out ever more abundantly about me, the more I simply look?
