Native Plants of Leona Canyon

I know more about Mediterranean and desert plants than I know about the local plants in the San Francisco East Bay. I plan to change that, and hope the change works its way into my shady, woodland, Oakland Hills garden.

A great local resource is the East Bay Regional Park’s network of parks and open space preserves. These parks enable you to see plants in their natural regional environments, such as oak woodland, chaparral, coastal scrub, grassland, and redwood and mixed evergreen forests. I learned to identify a few of the local plants at the Leona Canyon Preserve in the Oakland Hills.

Lupine	Sticky Monkey Flower
California Blackberry	Coastal Sage Brush

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Preserves located close to population centers frequently include non-native plants introduced intentionally, or naturally from their proximity to personal gardens. This makes it tricky for the newbie to distinguish between native and non-native plants. The East Bay Regional Park District runs an ongoing volunteer program to remove invasive, non-native species from the parks and preserves.

Invasive French Broom provides beautiful
color, but forces out native plants.

The Teacher’s Trail Guide publication for Leona Canyon includes a great write-up of native plants: http://www.ebparks.org/parks/leona. The park-specific write-up for Leona Canyon also provides information about its native species. For more plant lists see the Wild Plant Checklists.

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