Vascular Plants of Henry W. Coe State Park
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Contributors
Many people contributed to the development of the Coe Park plant list. The first for which I have any record were David Powers and Gary Larsen, who as students undertook a survey of the vascular plants as their portion of a San Jose State University baseline ecological inventory and human impact study. Their collections were made from April to August of 1972. The list of 225 taxa identified by Powers and Larsen formed the core of all subsequent lists.
Shortly after Ranger Barry Breckling was assigned to Coe Park in the fall of 1977, he began the card file which documents the locations of many additions to the Powers and Larsen list. He was quite active for several years, and even after his interests turned to other areas of natural history, he continued to encourage many volunteers, myself included, in our plant identification efforts. Barry retired in 2007, and we have been fortunate that he chose to remain at Coe almost 30 years.
Plant lovers here are also fortunate that Judy Mason, disregarding the advice to "Don't bother visiting Coe Park—all it has is rattlesnakes and rocks," came up with her husband Don to see for herself and fell in love with the place. Since 1985, she has made many significant finds, including the discovery of the rare Royal Streptanthus (Streptanthus callistus). She is a botanical illustrator of some talent, and was responsible for the drawings in Shrubs of Henry W. Coe State Park, among other things. Not to be underrated is her ability to infect others with her enthusiasm for wild plants, an attribute for which I, too, must thank her. Thank you Judy!
Toni Corelli studied plants here from 1985 to 1987 (and to a lesser extent, in more recent years), specializing in serpentine areas. She made many additions to the list, including most of the plants mentioned in the annotations as growing in serpentine soil. She also helped Judy Mason get her start in the complexities of technical botany.
Most of the grasses on the list were identified by Margaret Fleischer, Tina Billow, and Sally Casey. Working independently, the former simply contributed a list of the plants she had identified on an outing in the newly acquired Gill-Mustang Ranch addition in June '82, while the latter two each contributed lists of park grasses circa July of '84. Without the efforts of these three women, I suspect that the list of grasses, incomplete as it likely is, would be half its current length, for neither I nor anyone else has spent much time trying to identify them.
A number of other people deserve recognition. Kathy Paivinen made a small but excellently prepared collection of park plants, with the care characteristic of the artistry of her other works (most notably the mural in the interpretive room of the visitor center, the collection of hand painted casts of reptiles, the illustrations in the Care of the Wildlands booklet, and the Coe Park T -shirts). I was able to make several additions to the plant list from Kathy's pressed plant collection. Bonnie Larsen wrote a well-researched paper on chaparral which I found helpful, and also photographed and alerted me to an additional species of Orobanche she saw at the Dowdy Ranch.
Dave Hildebrand is the creator of the wildflower photo album that has for so many years been helping visitors and staff alike identify many common spring wildflowers in the park. His notes in this album also provided me with some additional locations of plants of which I was unaware. More recently, he has published a CD-ROM of his outstanding Coe wildflower photo collection. He has also given me permission to use his images on this website, and I have taken him up on his kind offer and have added many of them.
John Game has also given me permission to use his photos on this website. You can see more of his fine images on the Calphotos collection. He collaborated with Dianne Fristrom and Glenn Keator to produce the excellent interactive CD-Rom Wildflowers of the San Francisco Bay Area which you may preview here.
Tony Ferrari was the first entrant to the first periodic Coe Plant Photo Contest, and his entry is here online. You can see his homepage at this link.
Scott and Sandi Stevenson are (together) the second entrants to the periodic Coe Plant Photo Contest, and I have added many of their 44 entries to this catalog. They have come up with a number of not heretofore included species from their Coe backpack trips. They have also contributed images on assignment, to help fill in the gaps.
Don Savant was the first prize winner of the first periodic Coe Plant Photo Contest, and I have added many of his valuable entries herein.
Teresa Miller has given permission to use some of her images of the park, and one is included in the plants section.
Michael O'Brien has given permission to use some of his images of plants, park scenes, and animals, and this has resulted in some significant improvements in coverage.
Arvind Kumar has given permission to use some of his plant images, which have also significantly improved the coverage.
Gillian Zaharias has given permission to use some of her images of park scenes, animals and plants, and two of the latter are included in this plants section.
Gena Zolotar has given permission to use her many sensitively photographed images, and these appear in the photo tour, plants, and animals sections.
Jeff Hogue documented the locations of a number of species in 1982. Don Mason assists his wife Judy (credited above) in her plant outings. Lee Sims through his Shrubs of Henry W. Coe State Park has aided my knowledge of shrub distribution, as well as raising the level of interest in these important members of the ecological community. He also gave me with samples of the fruit and leaves of Juglans hindsii which convinced my skeptical mind that this species was indeed present in the park. Steve Edwards contributed a list of additions to the list after a visit ca. 1991. Dennis Pinion set me straight on the current classification of dwarf mistletoes, (Arceuthobium sp.) and the presence of both Arceuthobium occidentale and A. campylopodum in the park. The late Carl Sharsmith, besides assisting Judy Mason in some of her identifications, took the time to assist me in determining which of the Powers and Larsen specimens were deposited in the herbarium at San Jose State.
More recently, important additions to the list have been made by Carolyn Fatooh Schimandle, Judy Breckling (either with husband Barry or independently), Jim Tuomey, and Jeff Greenhouse.
The catalog which follows, however, is not an unedited compilation of everything that has been reported growing at the park. Some lists had evident errors. The contributors do not all have the same depth of background in taxonomy or even science in general, and even if we did, in the sometimes murky world of plant taxonomy, there is room for disagreement on the best name for any particular population of plants.
The final choice of the names in this catalog, then, were mine, and the presence of anyone's name above does not mean that they agree with my judgment. I have tried to include notes on problem groups, as is customary in the best floras (not that this work is up to the standards of the best floras—but I do the best I can). The reader should beware of lists which lack similar notes or question marks, for these may give you the false impression that the application of species names is more sure than it really is.
Thanks to everyone for their contributions. My apologies to anyone I may have overlooked. I hope that in some future version of this work I'll be able to give credit for specific identifications.
Henry W. Coe State Park, California
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