Ashley's Herbarium
Ashley Ratcliffe - California Grass Expert
There aren’t many people with which one can have a real conversation about grass. There are actually only a handful of people in the whole State who are passionate enough to have become experts in the identification and taxonomy of native coastal grass species of California - And Ashley Ratcliffe is one of them. I worked with grasses quite intensely for a period of time (in coastal and mountain grasslands for several field seasons, I took Poacea classes at UC Berkeley’s Jepson Herbarium, and I’ve studied at the California Academy of Sciences herbarium grass collections) – But not until my field and lab forays with Ashley did I truly begin to know and love grass. With her guidance my identification skills expanded exponentially, and this can be said by most of her students.
Ashley has established a highly successful seasonal grass class series, that she holds throughout late Spring at her home lab in Bolinas, and in the field in Marin County amongst several rare and striking grassland habitat types. The reputation of her grass intensives need no advertisement, and fill up quickly.
I’ve known of Ashley since I was a kid. She lives in a stately well-preserved 19th century seaside home, surrounded by bursting gardens and patrolled by her silly singular Abyssinian cat Chi Chi. Ashley is always elegant, and is one of the few truly polite and caring people I know of in Bolinas. She has fought the good fight, and spent many years investing her time, money and labor into the purchase and restoration of a neighboring property – one of the only green islands left in the overcrowded downtown beach zone of Bolinas
The neighborhood and street scene surrounding this parcel is known for throngs of patrolling and partying weekenders, an endless parade of circling idling vehicles searching out parking, a rowdy “let loose” attitude from visitors, and the resultant trash, pollution, and noise that goes along with it. The parcel was ultimately donated to the Marin Open Space District, with landscaping duties left to her and the small group of co-managers who founded the project.
Ashley has established an herbarium at her home lab, and is going strong on her project of pressing and cataloguing all the grass species of Marin. She figures she is about two thirds of the way done to having all collected. Later this year she will be re-keying all the current species in the herbarium to check for accuracy.
CZ: Tell me a bit about your background and how you got interested in grass.
AR: After a career in lighting and furniture design for 15 years I wanted a change, and began to take biology classes at the College of Marin under the direction of legendary biologist Al Molina. I was exposed to microbiology, botany, and was introduced to the world of California’s native plants. This opened up a passion for hiking and botanizing for me. I visited San Francisco State University’s Yuba Pass field station, and became inspired by the people doing plant taxonomy there. I was able to enroll in a program in botanical taxonomy at San Francisco State University, and had the good fortune to travel all over California with this class. With this incredible exposure to varied habitats and locations I got more and more interested in grasses, and I also found that no one else was very interested in it but me! From there I participated in lab classes at UC Berkeley’s Jepson Herbarium and at U.C. Davis, giving me a ton of keying experience. I was invited to co-teach a Poaceae class for Jepson, and to help lead classes for the Point Reyes National Seashore Association, a class for the employees at Point Reyes National Seashore, and a grass workshop for interns at Marin Municipal Water District. From there I started offering my own grass classes.
CZ: Tell me about the classes you offer.
AR: The classes are word of mouth, and I get calls throughout the year asking about them. I teach the classes in the Spring only, and they are two days long. Teaching grass is challenging – just trying to keep people engaged and not discouraged while presenting them with a complex subject that comes with a whole new vocabulary. Often those enrolled are starting from the beginning, presented with this new language, using a microscope for the first time, etc.. I keep the classes small so I can keep people engaged and answer all their questions. It can be an overwhelming amount of information to cover in two days, but it always works out in the end. I try to balance not discouraging anyone, but never oversimplifying this science.
The goal of my classes is to teach people to see grasses, and to key grasses. To key grasses one needs to understand the morphology of grass, which is quite different than other plants. I strive to make my classes accessible and fun, and an avenue to practice using the grass keys. We use the Jepson Manual, Marin Flora, and the Flora of North America. It’s important to use more than one key in order to get all the information you can gather on a species. I get a lot of repeat people in my classes, and I get former students coming by my place to key specimens they have questions about. My ultimate goal is to foster a population of people adept at grass taxonomy. During the class we visit several habitat types including wet meadow, serpentine grasslands, woodland, riparian, and dry-thin soil areas.
CZ: Why should people care about grasses, and native California grasslands?
AR: Grasses make up an enormous plant family worldwide. In California they are the second most specious family. They are omnipresent and deeply important in world food supplies, as well as for animal forage and building supplies. But aside from the utilitarian – grasses are vastly important components to many ecosystems, and comprise especially rare habitats in California. Grasses in California have been degraded and wiped out since the 18th century explorations and introduction of grazing livestock. Native bunch grasslands have suffered heavily due to grazing practices and development. It’s important to preserve those areas still hanging on, and those native grasslands that still flourish. There’s such a huge variety of grassland types in California at every elevation from seashore dunes to the high mountains.
The more you go out and look at grasses the more exciting it gets. You see the enormous diversity and how diverse morphologically they are. They are fascinating plants – all wind pollinated. They are so streamlined due to not needing to attract pollinators, but they are still very complex.
CZ: Having grown up in this neighborhood, I can appreciate what an effort it was to acquire, clean-up and preserve the land across the street. Please describe some of this story for us.
AR: I first want to acknowledge that I did not do this alone. Several people from the neighborhood formed a group to raise the money to purchase the Poetry Garden (the parcel is still referred to by it’s former town moniker the “Poetry Garden” by Ashley, as it was formerly owned by an elderly Filipino couple from out of town who would visit it on weekends tending to some of the property as a garden, as well as posting poems on the premises. The land was also known to be a homeless encampment in the thicker more remote areas of the property. It was placed on the market after the couple passed away, and once purchased, Ashley hired the encampment residents to help clean up the area with money raised for property maintenance), and generous donations came in from the Marin Community Foundation, as well as the Bolinas-Stinson Beach Community Foundation.
Our goal was to purchase the property so it would not be developed, and to restore much of it to native habitat following a coastal prairie restoration plan we developed. The land was given to Marin Open Space by our group, and is in the Marin Open Space inventory of land, but we maintain the grounds. Once the difficult task of purchasing the land was complete we had a lot of work in front of us to clean the place up, and restore what native habitats we could. It was all very political, and we are in our ninth year – but we have accomplished what we set out to do.
For the habitat restoration we cleared out most everything, leaving floats of native blackberry for bird and animal cover. Also, one maple, one plum, and four palms were saved due to town sentiment. Then we started from scratch. We worked with different soil areas on the property including deep sand, so we planted a lot of Eriogonum, Calamagrostis nutkaensis, Fragaria.. On the edge of the prairie soils we planted wild flowers. Grasses we planted included Festuca californica and Nassella pulchra. There’s a good amount of Ceanothus, buckeye, Symphorocarpos, Holodiscus discolor, low growing Baccharis pilularis, etc.. There are five oaks at the top of the property, Myrica californica, Sambucus, and Garrya elliptica.
Ashley and I continued-on to talk about the pleasures of witnessing serpentine
grasslands, the extraordinary grassland and wildflower sites she has visited
for the first time this year in coastal Marin and Sonoma Counties, as well
as a spectacular 80-year bloom she traveled to see near Mariposa on the Merced
River. For information on Ashely’s Ratcliffe’s Spring coastal
grass classes, she can be reached at: (415) 868-0681
Ashley Ratcliffe in the field - Mt. Tamalpais
Ashley Ratcliffe at home in the lab
