The Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is getting plants this month
It’s been three years since the crew for Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing’s Native Plant Nursery set up shop in Calabasas, dozens of rugged metal tables, a Spartan trailer and a million native seeds hand-picked from the surrounding hills.
It’s been three years since nursery managers Julia (pronounced “Julia”) Samaniego and Jose Campos have nurtured thousands of native plants from seed, despite the many snakes, the mass of bark-chewing, cougar-scented liquid needed to restart summer. Watering twice a day, even on weekends and holidays, and a two winters of mud, erosion and endless rain.
Julia Samaniego, right, and Jose Campos, co-directors of the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing Native Plant Nursery, have grown more than 5,000 native plants from seeds hand-picked from the hills surrounding the structure. Over the next few weeks, these plants will be moved from the nursery and planted in 10-by-10-foot grids at the crossing.
(Al-Saib/For The Times)
Now is graduation day, when native plants are ready to cross from seed trays to 1-gallon pots this month.
“It feels like going to college,” said Samaniego, a slim mother of four whose oldest is planning college. They’re ready to go and you want them to go, she said, “without waiting, are you sure you are?” really Ready?”
Ready or not, the 5,000 or more plants have to go as wildlife is poised to cross the 101 Freeway into the Agora Mountains, its unique, once lifeless soil brought back to life with an inoculation of the same microbes and mycorrhizal fungi that grow in the soil of the surrounding hills. After soil was added this summer, workers seeded the ground with a cover crop of native plants, especially good for starting fungi: Santa Barbara milk vetch, golden yarrow, California poppy and giant wild corn.
In late summer and early fall, many California native plants are brown and wilted, but they are still very much alive and will soon be planted in wildlife crossings, where they will grow and bloom in the spring. Here, nursery managers Julia Samaniego and Jose Campos give crossing supervisor Robert Rock and landscape designer Macala Gibson a tour of the more than 5,000 plants they’ve grown from seed.
(Al-Saib/For The Times)
These seeds have sprouted and grown in the cross over the last few months, especially the milk vetch, but they will 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.
“We don’t want to introduce salt-based chemical fertilizers, so you have to rely on them continuously,” said Robert Rock, CEO 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, such as from our cover crop, that enhance the soil’s natural nutrient capacity.”
Samaniego and Campos have always considered their jobs at the nursery to be more than just planting plants. They had training with native plants from Antonio Sanchez, manager of the Santa Monica Mountains Native Plant Nursery, and then Catherine Pacradoni, the first manager of Wildlife Crossing Nursery, who collected the first million seeds along a five-mile stretch of nearby hills.
But the emphasis on building soil microbes was new to them, Campos added: “I thought we were doing some restoration work, but it’s basically the restoration of land along the highway. We’re the nature of restoration.”
Rock, Samaniego, Campos and a few other colleagues met at the nursery on Monday to lift about 30 plants from the nursery in preparation for Tuesday’s planting ceremony. Samanigo, who is of Chumash and Tatawiyam descent, plans to wear the regalia of the Tatawiyam people, whose historic home ranged from the San Fernando Valley to the Simi Valley east to the Antelope Valley. Other long-term supporters of the project will have the opportunity to plant during the first official planting from the nursery.
A summer dormancy will brown and light the long stalks of buckwheat except for the small balls of pink flowers, but the plant should leaf out again in the spring. (Al-Saib/For The Times)
The red, deep flowers of California Fuchsia usually don’t appear until late summer or early fall. These plants remain dormant in winter. (Al-Saib/For The Times)
The celebration is among several events planned this week during Urban Wildlife Week, culminating Saturday with the 10th anniversary of P-22 Day, a free festival from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Griffith Park, onetime home of LA’s famous cougar.
During Monday’s preparations, Diego Banda, Caltrane’s principal assistant resident engineer for wildlife crossings, helped the boats climb steps 75 feet above the freeway to the top of the crossing. Then he and his team helped Puente Strategies’ Nadia Gonzalez, the project’s media coordinator, put up plywood boards to minimize soil formation during the ceremony, while Rock, Samaniego, Campos and landscape designer Macala Gibson dug holes for the plants chosen for the ceremony: Califoria furnia furnia, Califor Sanflower. vetch, California aster and purple needle grass.
There are many other native plants growing in the nursery — white sage, tuyon, buckwheat and other sages, to name a few — but Rock said many of those plants now look wilted after summer dormancy. “It looks like we’re planting dead plants, and it’s hard to explain to people,” he said. The plants chosen for Tuesday’s ceremony look lush, and have more visual appeal, he said.
As the plants for the ceremony were being taken out of the pickup, Rock rescued a small frog from the nursery and carried it to the top of the cross, releasing it near a section that had been thawed by temporary rain.
1. Jose Campos, co-director of the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing Nursery, picks up four pots of native California asters for planting at the crossing. (Al-Saib/For The Times) 2. Julia Samaniego, left, Robert Rock and Macala Gibson watch as Jose Campos drills a few more holes for a planting ceremony at the top of the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing on Oct. 21. (Al-Saib/For The Times) 3. A small frog that lives at Wallace Annenberg’s Wildlife Crossing Nursery rode its way to the crossing on Oct. 20 on plants that were brought in for planting the next day. The distraught Stow tried to get to the freeway, but project supervisor Robert Rock rescued the frog and released it at the top of the cross. (Al-Saib/For The Times)
The frog is the second flightless critter seen in the passage. In June, Beth Pratt, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation of California and head of the Save the Cougars campaign, which oversees fundraising and fundraising for the project, saw a western crested bird basking in the sun.
Rock said it will be at least another year before the crossing connects to the Santa Susana Mountains to the north and the Santa Monica Mountains to the south and is open to wildlife.
Phase 2, the most complex and difficult part of the crossing project, began earlier this summer, but the work is barely visible except from the top of the crossing or along Agoura Road north of the highway. Crews are 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 mound of dirt, connecting the crossing to the South Hills.
Already, there are weekday traffic delays on Agoura Road as a large drill lines both sides of the road with deep potholes. After each hole is drilled, a crane slowly lifts a 70-foot-long wire rod called a rebar cage and lowers it inch by inch into the hole. Once in place, the cylindrical cage is filled with concrete to form the foundation for the tunnel’s concrete wall and roof.
On the south side of the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, construction is drilling deep holes for concrete pavers that will serve as the foundation for a 175-foot-long tunnel that will cover Agoura Road and support a small mound of dirt that will connect the wildlife crossing to the Santa Monica Mountains.
(Al-Saib/For The Times)
Rock said the wildlife cross was built on front sections brought in from Perris, Calif., to limit freeway blockages, but the tunnel work on Agoura Road will all be put in place. He said that the aim is to continue the traffic during the day during the fall season, but by the end of this year, when the construction of the main tunnel will begin, the road will be completely closed for the safety of workers and motorists.
“We’re doing our best to minimize the impact on the community and not do full shutdowns until they need to,” Rock said. “But people use this road as a short cut and they’re used to zipping there. We’re letting people know they need to slow down.”
He said, the construction of the tunnel will be extended from the end of this year to the beginning of summer. Then will come the big job of moving dirt from a hill on the north side of the freeway, when the freeway was built in the 1950s, to cover the northbound tunnel and connect it to the cross. But earth-moving work likely won’t begin until late summer or early fall.
“People look at the site now and don’t think progress has been made,” he said. “But we have to start with the non-sexy pieces of construction first: utilities and foundations. Then you’ll start to see visual changes.”
At the same time, Campos and Samanigo have collected more seeds around the mountains because when the plants are cleared from the nursery for the crossing, they have to start planting a large group of plants, including oaks and other native trees, to cover the shoulders of the crossing when the soil is in place.
It’s a lot of work, Samaniego said, but one they’re excited to start.
(Jon Copaloff/Getty Images for #SaveLACougars and the National Wildlife Federation)
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