Lemmons
Sometimes, you just know things.
I know that when I get home, I’ll see my poppy in full bloom.
I can’t explain how I know this.
I just do.
I used to stare at a poppy drawing during breakfast.
She was one flower among many.
In Sequoia, Dad had bought us a souvenir, a California native wildflowers poster. When we got home, he took it to the mall and had it framed. He hung it in the dining room, by some clay plates hand-painted with happy rabbits, deer and nopales.
During mealtimes, when conversation turned boring, I studied the wildflowers.
The poppy was in the middle.
I’m glad that my father brought wildflowers to our every meal.
I’m glad that my father, a super-imperfect man, brought wildflowers to our every meal.
Sara Allen Plummer Lemmon lobbied the State of California to adopt the golden poppy as our official flower.
Sara got her citrus-y surname from John Gill Lemmon, a fellow botanist who she met in a city that shares its name with a soap opera, Santa Barbara.
Following their nuptials, the Lemmons went on a honeymoon that Sara described as a “grand botanical raid into Arizona.”
Sara was like Ida Mae Blochman, another white schoolmarm from Maine who settled in the West, fell in love with its native plants, became a citizen scientist, and then took things.
When John courted Sara, he wooed her by naming a shrubby plant after her.
The Spanish called this plant yerba del aire.
Ethnologist J.P. Harrington recorded Chumash uses for this plant.
Wili’lik’.
Today, the species is recognized as Baccharis plummerae.
I call this plant coyote brush.
Coyote brush cloaks the hills where Salomon Pico relieved cattlemen of their gold.
Coyote brush scraggled along the barbed wire fences enclosing the cattle who stared at our minivan as we rumbled past their pastures.
I once saw coyote brush holding hands with toloache.
Our father taught us to never f— with toloache.
We were in the countryside on a rock harvesting expedition. Dad had pulled over and my sister and I were helping him load stones into the van.
Near a roadside shrine, I saw a plant with resplendent green leaves and long-necked white flowers, angelic trumpets.
With a pointy finger, the plant beckoned for me to come close.
I went to shake his spooky hand.
“Get back here!” Dad yelled.
I jumped. He’d never screamed at me for being friendly to a plant.
“Why?”
“That’s jimson weed. It’s dangerous.”
“Why?”
“If you play with that plant, you’ll meet God.
Are you ready to meet God?”
Unprepared to meet our maker, I backed away from the tempting white flowers.
Toloache flashed me a sly smile.
I respect Toloache by keeping my distance from him.
He’s a magician capable of revealing secrets that aren’t for me.
When Sara Lemmon wrote about plants, she likened them to insects and animals, never magicians.
She made plants out to be things.
Its.
“It has fine green leaves like the locust, only not half as large, and at the touch, the pairs of leaves close. The flower is round, and pink, fine like the head of a mouse ear …”
When Lemmon wrote about native people, she chose adjectives that stabbed.
These are adjectives that she used to describe the Indians she encountered during her “botanical raid into Arizona.”
Sly.
Dirtiest.
Treacherous.
Cruel.
Degraded.
I’m glad that Sara’s married name was Lemmon.
She and her husband sour botanical history.
The Lemmons were friendly with another botanical couple, Mr. and Mrs. John Muir.
Mr. Muir acted the same way about national parks that that annoying tour guide did.
He wanted the parks turned into photosynthetic museums.
I haven’t been back to Muir Grove until today.
When I finish giving the grove’s sequoias my tears, I’m returning to the hill.
I have a gift for the hill monster.
This story was excerpted from Myriam Gurba’s new book “Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings.” Gurba is currently at work on “Fifteen Latinas,” an anarchic popular history of Latin America told through women.
The post Myriam Gurba unearths the story of the California poppy and restores its magic appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
