It’s been three years since the crew for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing Native Plant Nursery set up shop in Calabasas, with dozens of difficult-to-assemble metal tables, a spartan trailer and a million native seeds hand-collected from the surrounding hills.
That’s three years that nursery managers Jewlya (pronounced “Julia”) Samaniego and Jose Campos have nurtured thousands of native plants from seed, despite plenty of rattlesnakes, hordes of pot-gnawing squirrels, the vile smelling essence of cougar pee to repel the squirrels, blistering summers that required twice-a-day watering, even on weekends and holidays, and a couple winters of mud, erosion and endless rain.
Now it’s graduation day, when native plants coaxed from seedling trays to 1-gallon pots stand ready for planting on the crossing itself this month.
“It feels like going off to college,” said Samaniego, a slender mother of four whose oldest is in the throes of college planning. They’re ready to go and you want them to go, she said, “except, ‘Wait, are you sure you’re really ready?’”
Ready or not, the 5,000 or so plants have to go because the wildlife crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills is ready to receive them, with its special, once lifeless soil that was brought to life with inoculations of the same microbes and mycorrhizal fungi that thrive in soil of the surrounding hills. After the soil was added this summer, workers seeded the ground with a cover crop of native plants particularly good at kick-starting that fungi: Santa Barbara milk vetch, golden yarrow, California poppy and giant wild rye.
Those seeds have sprouted and grown on the crossing these last few months, especially the milk vetch, but they’ll be cut back to just a few inches this month to stress the plants and encourage the fungi to produce even more nutrients in the soil to help them out.
“We don’t want to introduce salt-based chemical fertilizers, so you have to continuously rely on them,” said Robert Rock, chief executive of Chicago-based Rock Design Associates and the landscape architect overseeing the $92.6-million project. “We want to rely on natural chemicals in the soil, like from our cover crop, which jump-starts that natural nutrient capacity of the soil.”
Samaniego and Campos have always consider their jobs to be more than just raising plants in a nursery. They had training with native plants from Antonio Sanchez, manager of the Santa Monica Mountains Native Plant Nursery, and then Katherine Pakradouni, the first manager of the wildlife crossing nursery who collected the first million seeds on five-mile foraging hikes around the nearby hills.
But the emphasis on building soil microbes was new to them, Campos said, adding: “I had the idea we were doing some restoration work, but this is basically restoring the land over the freeway. We’re kind of rebuilding nature.”
Rock, Samaniego, Campos and a few other associates met at the nursery Monday to load up about 30 plants from the nursery to prepare for Tuesday’s planting ceremony. Samaniego, who has Indigenous Chumash and Tataviam ancestry, planned to wear regalia of the Tataviam people, whose historic home ranged from the San Fernando Valley to the Simi Valley as far east as Antelope Valley. Other longtime supporters of the project would get a chance to plant during the first official planting from the nursery.
The celebration is one of several events planned this week during Urban Wildlife Week, culminating on Saturday with the 10th anniversary of P-22 Day, a free festival from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Griffith Park, the one-time home of L.A.’s famous cougar.
During Monday’s preparation, Diego Banda, CalTrans principal assistant resident engineer for the wildlife crossing, helped carry plants up the steep steps to the top of the crossing 75 feet above the freeway. Then he and his team helped Nadia Gonzalez of Puente Strategies, the project’s media coordinator, lay down plywood boards to minimize soil compaction during the ceremony, while Rock, Samaniego, Campos and junior landscape designer Makala Gibson dug holes for the plants chosen for the ceremony: bush sunflower, California fuchsia, more Santa Barbara milk vetch, California aster and purple needle grass.
The nursery is growing a lot of other native plants too — white sage, toyon, buckwheats and other sages, to name several — but Rock said many of those plants are looking ragged right now after summer dormancy. “It might look like we’re planting dead plants, and that’s hard to explain to people,” he said. The plants that were chosen for Tuesday’s ceremony look greener, he said, and have more visual appeal.
As the plants for the ceremony were being pulled from the pickup, Rock rescued a little frog stowaway from the nursery and carried it to the top of the crossing, releasing it near a section made muddy by the temporary sprinklers.
The frog is the second nonflying critter spotted on the crossing. Back in June, Beth Pratt, California regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation and leader of the Save LA Cougars campaign, who is overseeing funding and fundraising for the project, spotted a Western fence lizard basking in the sun at the top.
Rock said it will be at least another year before the crossing will be connected to the Santa Susana Mountains to the north and Santa Monica Mountains to the south and opened to wandering wildlife.
Stage 2, the most complicated and difficult part of the crossing project, began early this summer, but the work has been barely visible except from the top of the crossing or along Agoura Road on the north side of the freeway. Crews have been moving water lines and soon, they will bury power lines along about 175 feet of Agoura Road to make way for a tunnel that will cover the road and support a small mountain of soil, connecting the crossing to the southern hills.
Already, there are weekday traffic delays on Agoura Road as a giant drill bores a line of deep holes on either side of the road. After each hole is drilled, a crane slowly lifts a 70-foot-long wire straw called a rebar cage and, inch by inch, lowers it into the hole. Once in place, the cylindrical cage is filled with concrete to create a foundation for the concrete wall and roof of the tunnel.
The wildlife crossing was built in precast sections, brought in from Perris, Calif., to limit freeway closures, Rock said, but the tunnel work on Agoura Road will all be poured on-site. The goal is to keep traffic moving with periodic daytime closures as long as possible this fall, he said, but by the end of this year, when the main tunnel construction begins, the road will have to be closed entirely for the safety of the workers and drivers.
“We’re doing our best to reduce the impact to the community and not do full closures until they absolutely have to,” Rock said. “But people use that road as a short cut and they’re accustomed to zipping through there. We’re letting people know they need to slow down.”
The tunnel construction likely will stretch from the end of this year until early summer, he said. Then will come the huge job of moving soil from a hill on the north side of the freeway, created when the freeway was built in the 1950s, to cover the tunnel on the north side and connect the crossing. But that earth-moving work likely won’t start until the late summer or early fall.
“People see the site now and they don’t think progress is being made,” he said. “But we have to start first with the non-sexy pieces of construction: utility and foundations. Then you’ll start seeing the visual transformations.”
In the meantime, Campos and Samaniego have been collecting more seeds around the hills because once the plants are emptied from the nursery for the crossing, they must start planting a much bigger batch of plants, including oaks and other native trees, to cover the shoulders of the crossing once the soil is in place.
It’s a lot of work, Samaniego said, but a task they’re eager to start.
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