Archivist Stacey Peeples displays a hand-written text with a recipe for 'stomach pills.' (Photo: Todd Vachon/WHYY)

The nation's first hospital culled its archives to create a collection of medical and botanical texts from the 18th and early 19th century.

The exhibit, “Flower to Pharmacy,” is housed at the Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collections in Philadelphia. The illustrations are beautiful, the hand-written lecture notes from medical students are fun to decipher, but maybe most striking is the physicians' focus on body fluids.

Phlegm was a big deal in Colonial times.

“They really believed that these systems were out of whack and you had to do something to bring it back into order,” said curator and archivist Stacey Peeples.

Doctors practiced “humoral medicine,” an ancient idea that health comes from a balance of the body's four humors–phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. In addition to bloodletting, physicians relied on sweating and purging and needed the right mix of flowers, roots and herbs to make that happen.

A view of the library inside the historic Pennsylvania Hospital (Photo: Todd Vachon/WHYY)

The exhibit is a compendium of plants used for medicine as well as prescriptions for pills and poultices. Long lists detail the healing properties of blue flag and yellow-button tansy as well as familiar kitchen herbs such as ginger, rosemary and thyme.

In “The American Practice of Medicine,” Connecticut-born Wooster Beach writes that peppermint is “agreeable and penetrating, slightly bitter, followed by a sensation of cold in the mouth” and good for settling the stomach.

You can also look up ways to fight flatulence, hysteria, dropsy (inflammation), piles (hemorrhoids) and cardialgia (heartburn).

One of the oldest texts is a 1633 edition of John Gerard's “Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes.” The English herbalist includes detailed line drawings and warnings against the most poisonous plants.

“For them to say something will kill you immediately, probably means it was pretty harsh,” Peeples said. “Given the amount of enemas and purgatives these people were taking. It had to be really bad. We like to call it “heroic medicine,” that idea that the physician will go to any means to cure you, even if meant killing you.”

Most of the books were part of the hospital's active lending library and are amazingly preserved, especially Mark Catesby's “Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.” It's a picture book of plants and insects illustrated on deeply saturated color plates – and lovely for art’s sake alone.

Wendy Grube is a nurse practitioner and registered herbalist who teaches a course on alternative therapies at the University of Pennsylvania. She collects her own historical volumes on plant medicine and has done research in the Pennsylvania Hospital archives.

“Flower to Pharmacy” includes some of the first “materia medica” produced for an American audience, and Grube says the meticulous anthologies are fascinating for modern day herbalists.

Early colonial doctors had a very different conception of disease and hadn’t discovered viruses or bacteria, but Grube says that didn’t keep them from hitting on the true medicinal value of plants.

Sage, for instance, is antimicrobial and thyme has anti-viral properties.

Physicians made connections from careful observation over time, Grube says. Doctors likely didn’t understand that an herb was killing off microbes, but it was clear that certain plants helped for cold and cough, she said.

“Flower to Pharmacy” collects the texts used by white, male physicians at Pennsylvania Hospital in the 1700s, but Grube says their records include knowledge learned from Native Americans and traced back to ancient Egypt and Greece.

Curator Stacey Peeples said some of the information in the library collection was surely common knowledge among Colonial women who kept their own recipe books.

“Today if you have a headache, you don't run to the hospital,” Peeples said. “The first thing do, is you take an aspirin. It was similar at that time. The woman was entrusted with the care of the family.”

“Why did these traditions happen? They happened because they were effective. I don't think people really waste their time on things that aren't effective,” Grube said.

Climate change could dramatically affect the microclimates that have made California wine country so successful.

You've probably heard of the wines that made Napa and Sonoma famous, like Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. But what about Negroamaro or Nero d'Avola?

They're wine grapes that are well-adapted to hotter climates – the kind of conditions that California may be facing as the climate continues to warm. But for wineries that have staked their reputations on certain wines, adapting to climate change could be a tough sell.

Talk to any wine lover in California and they'll tell you how lucky they are to live in such rich wine-producing region. Take the recent meeting of the San Francisco Wine Lovers Group at Toast wine bar in Oakland, where the favorites are California Pinot Noir, Russian River Zinfandel, and Napa Cabernet.

In fact, the type of grape – or varietal – is how most of us think about wine.

"That's the big problem," says Andy Walker, a grape breeder in Viticulture and Enology at the University of California-Davis. "We've spent the last 100 years emphasizing varieties and we've really marketed those names very effectively."

Walker is strolling through UC Davis's test vineyard, where hundreds of different wine grapes from around the world are grown. The vast majority are unknown to consumers, because most wineries focus on only a handful of grapes. "Chardonnay, cabernet, merlot, pinot noir – those would make up probably a large percentage," he says.

Those are all French varieties, mostly suited for cool climates. California is warm by comparison and thanks to climate change, it's expected to get a lot warmer. Extreme heat can be the enemy of good wine. "It destroys acidity primarily and it changes color and aromatics," says Walker.

According to a recent study from Stanford University, about two degrees of warming could reduce California's premium wine-growing land by 30 to 50 percent. That could happen as soon as 2040. Water supply is also expected to be an issue.

"I think the interesting thing for me as a breeder is to take advantage of this and say, OK, here's a chance now to change thought and let's actually readapt varieties to California," he says.

Andy Walker walks through UC Davis's test vineyard.

But in many circles, grape breeding is a dirty term, according to Walker.

"Viticulture is the most backward form of horticulture that exists. We use these varieties that haven't been changed for decades, for millennia in some cases. And it really doesn't make any sense."

The problem starts in today's vineyards. If you look at rows of Pinot Noir vines, you aren't just looking at the original varietal. You're looking at clones. That's because vines are grown from a branch that's taken off an existing plant.

"Pinot noir is being propagated year after year after year. This essentially means that grapes have not been having sex very much," says Sean Myles , a geneticist at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College.

He says breeding is key for other crops, since farmers need seeds to plant every year. Wine grapes miss this opportunity to develop adaptability and disease resistance, since vines don't grow from seeds

"That means that we're not allowing the genetic material to be shuffled anymore. That genetic material is now standing still in time. And while the pathogens are evolving, the pinot noir is not," says Myles.

Andy Walker says there's plenty of genetic diversity out there for breeding, if you wanted to make today's varieties more heat tolerant or drought resistant. But there's a very big problem. Once your breed your pinot noir with something else, you can't call it pinot noir anymore.

"The last decision that hardest. Can we market this variety? We know it produces exceptional wine. We know the quality is better. But the next step is can we actually market it," says Walker.

That's a deal breaker for many vineyards, who think consumers won't buy varieties they don't recognize. Walker says looking ahead to climate change, there are already varieties out there today from Italy and Spain that would do well in a warmer California. "We could produce Barbera instead, or Negroamaro or Nero d'Avola from southern Italy and we'd be far better ahead."

These lush reds are popular in Italy but not so well known to Californians. Walker says it'll come down to marketing. "I don't think it's the consumer that's gonna make the shift. They have to be directed."

"I think it's really a pull from consumers," says Nick Dokoozlian, a Vice President at E & J Gallo Winery, the largest family-owned winery in the US. "In most cases, we're responding to consumer demand for a cultivar."

Dokoozlian says Gallo has been testing new wine varieties throughout its vineyards and has found some promising grapes. "The problem is we can't necessarily sell those varieties. Consumers aren't aware of them. The marketing aspect of climate change and the adaptation to climate change, really, the hurdles on the marketing side are much, much more significant."

Since vineyards can last up to 30 years, he says switching varieties is a major financial gamble. "The wine business is an extremely capital intensive business. The financial risk of planting the wrong variety in the wrong place is pretty significant."

Still, given the temperature and water supply changes projected for California, Dokoozlian sees the market shifting eventually. "I'm looking forward to having world-class California Nero d'Avola soon."

Applying herbicides to crops helps increase yield—but at a cost. Photo: tpmartins.

Recent headlines have brought to light some of herbicides’ unintended effects. The herbicide Imprelis, primarily used on golf courses and the like, has been linked to the death of conifers throughout the east and the midwest. The safety of the widely used herbicide Roundup has also been called into question. Herbicides can provide farmers and gardeners with advantages over unwanted weeds—but they also come with drawbacks.

When DuPont first introduced the herbicide Imprelis in 2010, it was seen as a pretty environmentally friendly option. It is really effective at preventing the growth of weeds like dandelions and ivy. It affects plants’ hormone receptors, and it works at low concentrations. Unlike other herbicides, hot temperatures or rainfall just after application do not make Imprelis ineffective—a benefit for lawn care professionals, who otherwise have to time the application of herbicides according to the weather report. But Imprelis doesn’t bind to the soil and can leach into groundwater, two reasons why the state of New York has not approved it. (California has not approved it either.) Because of these characteristics, the herbicide being taken up by nearby trees through their root systems. As a result, conifers’ needles turn brown, and some trees die. The chemicals in Imprelis stick around in the grass clippings, creating killer compost that should go to the landfill rather than the compost bin or mulch pile. We haven’t heard the end of the story of Imprelis.

We will likely also hear more about Roundup, a big player manufactured by Monsanto. This story in the Huffington Post describes several studies that indicate that the herbicide causes birth defects. Roundup and other similar herbicides contain glyphosate, which causes reproductive problems in adult animals and birth defects in animals’ offspring. Organisms like rabbits can be exposed when herbicides are applied and when they eat the plants that have been treated. Lab studies have shown that exposure to glyphosate results in malformations in frog and chicken embryos. And, lab studies show that Roundup also poses problems for human embryonic and placental cells. Herbicides that contain glyphosate are hugely popular, because they’re so effective. In the last year for which data are available, 2006-2007, the US agricultural industry applied 180 to 185 million pounds of glyphosate. From 2005 to 2007, non-agricultural use added another 8 to 11 million pounds to the ecosystem. This chemical is increasingly ingrained in the US agricultural system: farmers purchase genetically modified seeds that are resistant to Roundup (such as Roundup Ready Soybeans), and then spray Roundup on the crops. These methods allow for much higher crop yields than organic agriculture, and are cost-effective for big farms. Without the advantages that herbicides provide, farms cannot compete.

Eradicating weeds is a challenge, and herbicides are a big part of fighting that battle. We have a complex relationship with weeds—check out this great conversation about weeds on Science Friday last week. Herbicides give us some key advantages over unwanted weeds. These advantages come with drawbacks. The two herbicides under question are primarily used by industry—lawn care professionals and big ag farmers—rather than individuals. But the average citizen uses herbicides on his or her home lawn, too. Do you use herbicides? Why or why not?

Young plants of the Arctostaphylos franciscana, or Franciscan manzanita, once thought to be extinct in the wild.

The plant became visible after construction crews removed taller vegetation from a rocky outcropping just south of the toll plaza near Doyle Drive. Botanist Daniel Gluesenkamp’s rediscovery of one of the rarest plants in the world made headlines across California.

“No one thought to look in the middle of a center divider of a freeway.  But there it was,” said Don Mahoney, curator at the San Francisco Botanical Garden. “I doubt if there’s another one ever going to be found.”

The cameras and public attention have long since gone away. But 15 months later, biologists and gardeners have been quietly and painstakingly working from the single surviving wild specimen to reestablish a population of the species that a century ago was found cascading down rocky outcroppings in San Francisco’s hills.

And they’ve already started to see significant success.

The Doyle Drive Franciscan manzanita, as the plant uncovered in 2009 is referred to, was moved about a mile away from the construction site, to an undisclosed location in the Presidio, to protect it from thieves and curious onlookers.

Don Mahoney holds one of the nearly 170 Franciscan manzanitas that the San Francisco Botanical Garden has grown from the one found in 2009.During the move, some branches were trimmed off so it would fit on a crane, said Mahoney.  The cuttings were divided among six institutions: the San Francisco Botanical Garden; the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley; the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley’s Tilden Park; the Arboretum at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Presidio’s own native plants nursery and Cal Flora, a commercial nursery in Sonoma County specializing in manzanitas.

Together they have grown 424 plants genetically identical to the one found in the Doyle Drive construction site, said Betty Young, director of nurseries for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, who is coordinating the effort.

Close to 170 of these young plants live in pots in a sunny area of the San Francisco Botanical Garden’s nursery, and now have roots and tiny flower buds that will bloom in the spring. From the one have come many, and with them, hope for restoring some of the Bay Area’s original wild character.

“Each one is ready to be a 14-foot across plant,” said Mahoney, “if we can just find enough spots in San Francisco to plant them all.”

The ultimate goal is to establish populations of the Franciscan manzanita in the wild.  To do so, experts must first find places where the plant is likely to thrive.  The challenge is to find open spaces with the type of rocks where Franciscan manzanita likes to grow.

A Franciscan manzanita cascades over a bluff at San Francisco's Laurel Hill cemetery in 1938. Courtesy of Alice Q. Howard.The plant grew on serpentinite and green stone rock, which occur commonly in earthquake zones.  San Francisco is crisscrossed by these rocks, said Michael Chassé, a geography graduate student at San Francisco State University and a natural resources management specialist at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, who is writing his thesis on the Franciscan manzanita.  Places like the former Mint building at the top of Market Street, are believed to have had Franciscan manzanita growing on serpentinite, he said.

Most such rocky formations now have buildings on top of them – this loss of habitat is what led the Franciscan to extinction in the early 1940s.  Chassé is looking for patches of open space at least one acre in size where the rocks are still present.

He has identified and started to visit about 10 possible San Francisco locations in the Presidio, Mt. Davidson, McLaren Park, Twin Peaks and the Starr King Openspace.  The sites are, for the most part, protected either by San Francisco Recreation and Parks or the National Park Service.

But open space alone isn’t enough to create a healthy population of Franciscan manzanitas, said Chassé.

“When you think about reintroducing a plant, you want the widest genetic diversity,” he said.  “You don’t want to just plant individuals from one plant.”

When plants are able to cross-pollinate with plants that are of their same species but have a different genetic makeup, they’re more likely to produce seeds that will allow the plants to reproduce spontaneously.

All 424 Franciscan plants grown by the botanical gardens come from the one found near Doyle Drive by Gluesenkamp, director of habitat protection and restoration for Audubon Canyon Ranch, in Marin County. This means that the plants are like genetically identical siblings of each other.

As it turns out, though, suitable mates are available.  These are plants that botanists saved in the 1930s before the Franciscan manzanita disappeared in the wild.

Manzanitas are recognizable by their reddish bark.The last known location where Franciscan grew was San Francisco’s old Laurel Hill cemetery, where the city’s Laurel Heights neighborhood now stands.  The land where San Francisco’s cemeteries operated became so valuable that in the 1930s the city passed an ordinance to prevent burials, with the intention of closing them down, said Chassé.  By 1940, Laurel Hill cemetery had been bulldozed and the last of the wild Franciscan was gone.

But botanists had collected samples and planted them in local botanical gardens like the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley’s Tilden Park.  Franciscan manzanitas were also planted at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley and others, where they can be seen in their collections today.

Chassé said he doesn’t know how many Franciscan plants with different genetic makeups exist in these gardens. Genetic testing – which is complicated, expensive and time-consuming – hasn’t been conducted.  So he is visiting botanical gardens, talking to curators like Mahoney and combing documents to try to figure it out.

“Are there 20, or two or three?” he said.  “The records are unclear.”

Manzanita berries are called bear berries because bears like them. People can eat them too. They're sour.Distinctive for their reddish bark and white and pink bell-shaped flowers, botanists consider manzanitas to be California’s iconic plant.  Some 50 species are distributed throughout the state, each adapted to a particular ecosystem, from the coast to the High Sierra, said Mahoney.  The Franciscan is one of two manzanita species that grew only in San Francisco, thriving in its foggy climate.

In Spanish, manzanita means “little apple.” The plant’s tiny, apple-shaped fruit are edible, and Native-Americans used them as a staple in the winter and spring, said Mahoney. But as buildings spread across San Francisco’s landscape, the city’s two unique species of manzanitas were destroyed.

Today, the difficulties of reestablishing a population of rare plants in the wild is illustrated by the story of the other manzanita found exclusively in San Francisco.  The Raven’s manzanita, a low-lying shrub like the Franciscan, was also believed to have gone extinct in the wild until it was rediscovered in 1952, also in the Presidio.

Just like the Franciscan, a single plant of Raven’s manzanita exists in the wild, in an undisclosed location in the Presidio.  But unlike the Franciscan, no other specimens of Raven’s manzanita were salvaged.  So it has been near impossible for botanists to get the plant to produce seed from which a plant will grow.

The Raven's manzanita faces a harder time than the Franciscan manzanita. Only one individual exists.The University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley has had some success, said curator Holly Forbes.  It is the only botanical garden that has produced seeds from the Raven’s manzanita.  But in order to get the seeds to actually germinate and grow into a plant, a volunteer at the garden had to try 32 different methods, said Forbes.  (The two methods that worked involved either refrigerating them, or soaking the seeds in liquid smoke, an infusion produced from smoke passed through water.)  The garden has since managed to get 15 Raven's manzanitas to grow from seed.

“Our goal was to get new genes that might give it an advantage for surviving in the wild,” said Forbes.  Even though the seeds came from plants that are genetically identical to each other, some genetic recombination does happen during the process.

With more genetic material to work with, botanists expect the Franciscan manzanita to have an easier time than its relative, and are excited at the prospect of trying to recreate part of San Francisco’s native landscape.

“I look at remaining natural habitats as the original skin of the Earth.  And there’s very little of that left in San Francisco,” said Mahoney.  “And to actually find one of the anchor and key plants that originally existed in San Francisco and to be able to save it meant a lot to anybody who works with plants and the environment.”

Watch a video about the San Francisco Botanical Garden's work to bring the Franciscan manzanita back from the brink of extinction:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Mistletoe grows on the branch of an oak tree in Briones Regional Park. Photo: kqedquest.

Have you been hanging out under the mistletoe at holiday parties, hoping for a kiss? Well, that mistletoe is more than a Christmas kissing custom. It’s a parasite that can harm trees—and a potential treatment for cancer.

Mistletoe lives on the branches of trees, and is a hemi-parasite; it produces some of its own food (it has green, photosynthetic leaves), but it gets nutrients and water from its host plant (its roots tap into the host plant, rather than the soil). If the mistletoe grows big enough, they can do some damage. Large mistletoe plants can weigh down tree branches and make them more likely to break off during a storm. If there are many mistletoe plants in a single tree, they can stunt the tree’s growth, make it more susceptible to disease, and even kill it.

There are several species of mistletoe living in California. Pacific mistletoe, Phoradendron villosum, lives in the western US, and is a parasite on oak trees. European mistletoe, Viscum album, parasitizes a wide range of species, including apple trees and maples.

Mistletoe is spread from tree to tree by birds. They eat the white berries and spread the sticky seeds with their beaks or in their excrement.

Despite its parasitic tendencies, mistletoe has long been thought to have healing powers. In Greek legends and druid folklore, mistletoe was used to treat disease. And since the 1920s, scientists have been investigating mistletoe extract as potential cancer drug.

Several laboratory studies have shown that mistletoe extract can kill cancer cells—though other studies have shown that the extract has no effect. It seems that mistletoe growing on different types of trees (like apple, pine, oak, or elm) may have different medicinal properties.

Mistletoe extract seems to boost the immune system, by increasing the production and activity of white blood cells. (Don’t try this at home—mistletoe can be poisonous.) Several clinical trials, mostly in Europe, have tested mistletoe extract as a form of adjuvant therapy—a treatment that is given to cancer patients after their primary treatment, to decrease the risk that cancer will return. Patients were treated with mistletoe extract (injected under the skin), along with radiation and chemotherapy. Patience who received the mistletoe extract fared better than their counterparts who did not receive it. Additional studies are underway: check out the National Cancer Institute’s Questions and Answers About Mistletoe.

While you’re standing awkwardly under the mistletoe at your next cocktail party, you can wait quietly for that special someone, or you can strike up a conversation about mistletoe’s medicinal properties.

Related posts:
Briones Regional Park Exploration

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A tree branch covered in nitrogen-loving lichen. (Credit: Martin Hutton)

Pollution from cars and trucks blows into the Sierra Nevada mountains, where it can have a dramatic impact on the ecosystem. In Yosemite National Park, researchers are trying to gauge that impact by using an unexpected tool: a fungus called lichen.

Yosemite Valley is known for its granite landmarks: Half Dome, El Capitan and the sheer walls that surround the valley. But according to botanist Martin Hutton, the granite isn't really visible.

"Basically what we’re looking at is lichens. We barely even see this rock. It’s all lichens."

Listen to the QUEST radio story Lichen Point to Pollution.

The southern walls of Yosemite Valley are covered in black crust. Last year, Hutton repelled hundreds of feet down the cliffs to survey the species living here. "All sorts of different colors. All sorts of different shapes. They're really special. There are no trees up there. There's no shade." Hutton says there are more than 500 species of lichen in Yosemite and many grow where few other plants can.

Lichens Connected to the Air

Despite looking tough, lichens are some of the most sensitive organisms in the ecosystem. Hutton uses a fallen tree branch to point out the species living there. "I see really deep saturated orange and that is Caloplaca. And there's just this beautiful just deep saturated yellow and that is the yellow of the Candelaira."

The yellow lichen, Candelaira, is warning sign for Hutton. "If you were to go to place with very little air pollution, then you would not be seeing this many of these Candelaria species," said Hutton.

While most plants get nutrients from the ground, lichens get much of what they need from the air. "They are basically directly connected to the atmosphere. They're connected to all of it. They see all of it. It’s one of the reasons they’re so sensitive," said Hutton.

Lichen are sensitive to changes in the air, especially from air pollution. That makes them an indicator of bigger ecosystem changes. Hutton and his team are taking lichen samples at 300 sites around the park and analyzing them to see what story they tell.

Measuring Pollution in the Ecosystem

Further into a nearby pine forest, Hutton and his team have set up funnels that collect air pollution samples. But it's clear something else has gotten there first. Hutton's equipment is strewn across the ground, the victim of a curious black bear.

"Yeah, basically a bear grabbed this funnel and plucked it off the stake. They just want to make sure that there's no food associated with this plastic funnel," said Hutton.

This is one of 12 sites where researchers are measuring a key ingredient of air pollution: nitrogen. Nitrogen oxides are produced by car and truck exhaust. In Yosemite, nitrogen pollution isn’t only from nearby cars. It also arrives from elsewhere in the state.

"We all have experienced the westerly winds that happen that blow stuff essentially from over the ocean, across the Central Valley and up into the mountains," said Lee Tarnay, Air Resource Specialist at Yosemite National Park.

Air pollution from urban areas is blown into the Sierra Nevada mountains by those westerly winds. And the problem is: nitrogen pollution is sticky. "That gas likes to stick to pine needles and just about anything else. And these trees act as a giant collector for the gases that stream through the air," said Tarnay.

When it rains, the nitrogen pollution is washed off the pine needles and deposited on the ground. As any backyard gardener knows: nitrogen is a fertilizer.

"All plants need nitrogen to grow. And some plants need a lot of nitrogen and some need only very little. And so in Yosemite, we already had enough nitrogen to begin with," said Hutton. Sierra Nevada forests are adapted to low levels of nitrogen.

Impact of Nitrogen Pollution in the Ecosystem

"We're worried that additional fertilizer in Yosemite could have effects that we might not anticipate. We think that the Yosemite is system as is it should be now. So we want to make sure that if there's something harming or changing that balance, then we want to know that," said Hutton.

Hutton says that balance is already under threat by invasive plants and many respond to higher nitrogen levels. Nitrogen can also encourage more ground plants to grow, a major concern in fire country. "If you increase the amount of nitrogen, you have plants that basically fill up the space in between these natural patches. And so that means that fires can spread a lot better."

Reducing car traffic in Yosemite could help cut air pollution. It will also depend on regional air districts across California, several of which, like the San Joaquin Valley, exceed federal air pollution limits. Hutton says he's hopeful that research in Yosemite will help them identify pollution hotspots and manage the changes in the field.

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Tamalpais Manzanita, Mount Tamalpais State Park. Photo: randomtruth.

Serpentine, California’s state rock, is feeling some pressure—and not just because it’s a metamorphic rock! The California Legislature is considering a bill that would strip serpentine of its state rock status; geology blogger Brian Romans explained the details in this recent QUEST blog. Basically, proponents of the bill say that because asbestos is made from serpentine rock, and asbestos causes cancer, serpentine should not be the state rock. Never mind that serpentine does not cause cancer. In fact, many organisms thrive on serpentine soils. And that is what today’s post is about—the unique plants and animals that call serpentine soil home.

Serpentine soil is a tough environment: the soil is coarse, so water runs right through it, making it very dry. It is often dark in color, so it heats up in the sun. And its chemical makeup is challenging to plant life, to say the least. The soil has high concentrations of heavy metals, like nickel, iron, and chromium, and low concentrations of nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus. It is also really high in magnesium, which makes it hard for plants’ roots to take up those already-scarce nutrients. And it is low in calcium, which causes ion balance problems for plants.

With nutrients scarce, serpentine inhabitants tend to be small in stature—it’s hard to grow big without much food. And, with low water availability, serpentine plants are drought-tolerant. They often have tough little leaves, which don’t lose much water. Some examples are the Tamalpais manzanita (Arctostaphylos montana), and the Leather Oak (Quercus durata).

Plants on serpentine soils also have to deal with those heavy metals, which can interfere with metabolic processes. Some plants, like the Milkwort Jewelflower (Strepthanus polygaloides), have a really high tolerance for heavy metals. Milkwort Jelweflower is a nickel hyperaccumulator—it can take up lots of nickel from the soil, with no ill effects. In fact, some serpentine plants are used in bioremediation; people plant them in contaminated soil, where they pull the heavy metals out of the ground and sequester them in their tissues.

Serpentine soils are home to many endemic species—species that live in a particular habitat type, and nowhere else. Sometimes plants or animals are limited to one habitat because they can’t survive the physical conditions of other habitat types. But in the case of serpentine endemics, many can live in other habitats’ nutrient-rich soils, but are total weaklings when it comes to competition with other plants. They can’t live in other habitats simply because they are out-competed.

Serpentine soils are home to more than just plants—there are butterflies, too, like the beautiful California White (Pontia sisymbrii). Some, like a rare variant of the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly, Euphydryas editha luestherae, are serpentine endemics, because they lay their eggs exclusively on plants living on serpentine soils.

The Geoblogosphere is buzzing with commentary about California’s serpentine bill. If you feel passionate about keeping serpentine as the state rock, by all means write your state representative—but also visit some serpentine habitat! There are lots of places in the Bay Area where you can check out serpentine soils and their inhabitants. There are serpentine outcroppings on Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo (be sure to check out QUEST’s Mount Diablo State Park Exploration!), and in the Berkeley and Oakland hills.

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Quantum mechanics and Foosball? Credit: RickyDavid.

When I began this story, it seemed pretty simple. I'd heard that scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab were working to mimic photosynthesis and create a man-made version of the process that could supply us with renewable energy.

The premise is to create a "closed-loop" energy system. Artificial leaves would use water, sunlight and carbon dioxide as inputs to create fuels like butane. Those fuels would be used for transportation or fuel cells. And by burning those fuels, we would produce carbon dioxide. The cycle goes on from there.

I never thought that quantum mechanics would enter the picture. That's what I discovered at the UC Berkeley lab of Graham Fleming. He says we have a lot to thank photosynthesis for. It produces the oxygen we breathe and is the basis for the entire food chain on the planet.

Fleming's lab is dedicated to understanding how photosynthesis works so well. And one of the things they've found is that plants are somehow tapping into quantum mechanics to improve their efficiency. It's pretty complicated – but with the help of the folks in Fleming's lab, they helped me understand it through, of all things, Foosball. Here's an audio version of it to help you out.

Listen to the Building an Artificial Leaf radio report online, and listen to our Web Extra: Photosynthesis and Foosball.

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Coco-de-mer, the world's largest seeds

There was a great variety of unusual specimens elucidating adaptation and evolution. One caught my eye, however, because I used to pass by it every day at our Howard Street location on the way up to my desk. I had presumed it was a cacao seed, but in truth it was a Coco-de-Mer, better known as the world's largest seed.

Coco-de-Mer, also known as "the double coconut", is the seed of the Lodoicea maldvica plant, a large fan palm that reaches 25 m (82 ft) in height. The palm is only found on two islands -– Praslin & Curieuse in the Seychelles. The palm is best known for the seed of its fruit, which is the largest in the world, weighing in at 15 to 30 kg (33 to 66 lbs).

The palm species was named maldvica after the Maldive Islands, the place the seeds were first found (before the 18th century the Seychelles islands were still uninhabited). Seeds that had germinated (and were therefore hollowed out) would find their way into the water, and prevailing sea currents carried a great many of them to the Maldives. The seeds were used by indigenous people on the islands for medicinal treatments and in trade.

Many stories abounded about the source of the seeds before the truth was discovered in the Seychelles islands in 1768. Many believed the seeds came from a mythical tree that grew at the bottom of the sea. European nobles would often have the Coco-de-Mer seeds cleaned and encrusted with jewels– befitting their mythical origins — in order to display them as collectibles in private galleries. Today, the Coco-de-Mer is still considered a treasure and the seeds and plants from which they grow are protected as a rare species.

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Pacific Madrone

Marin will look Baja. Berkeley like Bakersfield.

That's the projection of climatologists for the end of this century, if global warming continues on its current path.

But in trying to determine what California's plant life will look like based on those projections, studies and computer models only go so far. Despite the dire warning raised by this recent plant-loss study, biologists say the reality probably will be a lot worse.

In trying to get your mind around the idea that two-thirds of California's endemic plant species will lose 80 percent of their range by the end of the century, there are two ways to look at it.

The first is that, well, plants will just be different. It's not as if we're going to have barren soil where plants are now. As climate changes and warms, plants will most likely shift to the north. If we're talking an 8.3 degree Celsius shift in the summers, that means a rise of about 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer. Desert plants would move into Bakersfield and the Central Valley, for example. And in the Bay Area, the climate would be more similar to Southern California.

So, one way to think about it is: Plants will migrate or shift to cooler climates, so our endemic plants wouldn't necessarily disappear – they would just shift north.

But there were many factors that were NOT included in the plant-loss projection. And, as study author David Ackerly says, they are sobering.

If plants migrate, where will they go, and how will they get there? They need a certain type of soil, a certain amount of water. Many times, they interact with and need the plants or animals around them to survive; for instance, the gooseberry might need an animal that likes its berries so that its seed can be spread. And they don't just get up and walk north. It's a long, laborious process that can easily be derailed.

During the last Ice Age, plants migrated a thousand miles, Ackerly says, over about a thousand years. So why can't plants here move a hundred miles in a hundred years? Let us count the ways.

So IF the soils are compatible, IF the entire ecosystem of plants and animals can successfully travel north, IF such sites as vernal pools can somehow be created in the north, IF those ecosystems can somehow leapfrog over cities, farms, reservoirs, roads, ranches and other developments and find a compatible area that doesn't already have a robust ecosystem, IF the slow-growing plants can somehow travel a mile a year for the next hundred years, then yes, you'll successfully have a new habitat in a different place farther north.

Biologists suspect that most endemic plant species in California will die, if climate change continues at the same pace. For instance, redwood trees could still be growing in California by the end of the century, because the adults are hardy – but scientists say it will be a forest of the "living dead," meaning that, if no seedlings can make it, those adults will be the last redwoods on earth.

And the plants that come in to replace California plants, they say, will be invasive species – more commonly known as weeds – the fast-growing Mediterranean-climate plants with light, airborne seeds that will take over a barren area.

That's different plant life, true. But it's unlikely, they say, that our madrone or bay ecosystems will actually be re-created a hundred miles away, unless we move them up there ourselves.


View a slideshow of the"Disappearing Plants" Radio Report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

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