Wonderful reading you’ve turned up, Michael! Thank you. I love it when talk online gets even a ittle below the surface. It’s so easy to imagine Jepson and Purdy entertaining and teaching each other with details from the wild. Clambering over scree. Rocking on their porches back in Ukiah. Daydream: a PBS picnic at The Terraces. Walking, talking, looking. Daydream: flying low, like a bird, over this continent before humans arrived. Millions of years ago, seen by animals but not by us, the ancestors of NA lilies are quietly crossing from Asia and dispersing. Paige Woodward On the once and future island of Chilliwack Mountain in SW British Columbia > On Jul 19, 2023, at 11:32 PM, Michael Mace via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote: > > Paige wrote: >> I've been asked whether Carl Purdy's property in Ukiah, The Terraces, > still exists. Does anyone know? > > This is a fun topic, Paige! Thanks for bringing it up. > > I did some digging online, and it doesn't look like the property was paved > over, but it's hard to tell exactly where the house was, or whether it still > exists. Here are some tidbits about it: > > This link has a picture of the home, and says it was a couple of miles up > Mill Creek Canyon. > https://ukiahdailyjournal.com/2021/09/… > -ago-september-1921/ > > (By the way, these links are all one line of text. If your email system > breaks them into several lines, you will need to remove the carriage returns > and make them back into single lines.) > > There is still a Mill Creek Canyon Road east of Ukiah, and based on what I > see on Google Maps it is mostly undeveloped. > > Here is a delightful article about a visit to the Terraces, absolutely worth > reading (the transcript is on the left side of the page). > https://cdnc.ucr.edu//… > ------- > > There is a shorter article here: > https://newspapers.com/article/3796393/… > > And here are Jepson's field notes (yes, that Jepson) about a visit to > Purdy's place. He says Purdy was growing lilies just over the border of Lake > County, in Lyons Valley, while the Calochortus terraces were at the head of > Mill Creek. > https://ucjepsarchives.berkeley.edu/archon/… > id=703 > > On Google Maps, there are a couple of homes in that area today but it is not > heavily developed at all. Whether there is anything left of the gardens, I > have no idea. Unfortunately, Street View does not reach up into the canyon. > > Based on the articles, Carl Purdy was a lot more than a bulb harvester. He > grew native and exotic bulbs for sale, was a well-known landscape designer, > and was generally well respected in his day. I am not a fan of collecting > bulbs in the wild, but I don't think we can really judge him 100 years > later. Conditions are very different today. And I think it's fair to note > that he never caused the extinction of any bulb species in California. The > Calochortus species that we know we've lost were done in by > agriculture/grazing and the construction of Interstate 5. And C. > tiburonensis, which we almost lost, was threatened by a housing development. > I think it's fair to say that various forms of agriculture and development > have been a much bigger threat to the flora of California than collectors. > That doesn't make collecting from the wild OK, but we should keep it in > perspective. > > I want to let Carl Purdy speak in his own defense about his collecting > practices. This is from one of the articles above: > > "Does not this wholesale collecting tend to despoil the state of it's > lilies?" I asked. > "Oh, no, indeed," was his reply "The greatest enemies of our native bulbs > are the gophers and forest fires. My collectors are instructed. to leave the > bulbels and stalks, carefully covering them, and in a few years they produce > more than were dug out. Imagine, if you can, a spot where seven thousand > trillluums could be dug in one day, and yet they would hardly be missed from > the many thousands remaining. That is what I have done in the mountains > north of Willits." > > I am not sure I believe that, but I'm also not sure it's untrue. We'd need > someone to run an experiment to be sure. > > _______________________________________________ > pbs mailing list > pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net > http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… > Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> > PBS Forum https://… _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> PBS Forum https://…