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truly threatened violets & butterflies

Another note from Ray Collett in Santa Cruz. bill grant


(1) A second chasmogamous flower has appeared on the Laguna Creek form of the Santa Cruz Mountains violet. (2) Again, the flower is so small, you wouldn't be likely to find it. (3) Again, (as is common in other Santa Cruz Mountains violets) the bractlets are lower down than the middle of the flower stem and, worse, they have purple-headed hairs as well as many other hairs. (4) Like all other Santa Cruz Mountains violets, they produce fragrance that is stronger and better than you can encounter in the best parfum violets that humans have ever bred. (5) For more than a century people have written that true violet fragrance is found only in European violets, which would make it seem that quite a few West Coast native violets have been able to avoid being checked out for the singular quality most valued by humans in violets for millennia. (6) So resistant are some people to the notion that such a wonderfully fragrant violet might be native that they have accepted that Santa Cruz Mountains violets must have escaped from somebody's garden. Well, from whose garden did they escape? (7) Who would grow a violet with flowers so small and so few as the Laguna Creek form might choose to reward them with? (Of course, humans are greatly taken by other Santa Cruz Mounains violets.) (8) Santa Cruz Mountains violets behave like natives. When summer comes on, they die back. When water arrives from a hose or from the sky, they spring up, irrespective of how cold it is or how low the sun is. (9) Since the spurs are big and the stems of the plants get tall and branch, various botanists have declared that all Santa Cruz Mountains violets are dog violets, despite the fact that Santa Cruz Mountains violets don't much resemble dog violets in many other ways. (10) Highly threatened are Santa Cruz Mountains violets. Is the USFWS willing to protect an organism too rare to have a name? Why not? (11) Some Santa Cruz Mountains violets are threatened by ever spreading Vinca major, which is on the list of the most dangerous organisms on earth and which is a host to Pierce's disease, which, too, is on the list of the most dangerous organisms on earth. (12) Autistic are the burgeoning administrative enemies of Santa Cruz Mountains violets. All of the many kinds of violets on the UCSC campus (including an especially beautiful & floriferous form of Santa Cruz Mountains violet) are conspiratorially threatened because of the pervasive fear of reductions in traceable or untraceable perks. At UCSC forests get annihilated when heavy equipment is used to get at violet plants. No expense is too great! & because administrative actions transpire beneath the cover afforded by the autonomy of the somnolent UC Regents, no checks on UCSC excess can be expected to exist. (UCSC administrators with amazing titles cannot be expected to read but must be expected to know that wild violets are the only food of caterpillars of several different greater fritillaries (which either are or should be federally protected).) Who hath seen a UCSC administrator smelling a violet?

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