Popular Studies of California Wild Flowers 119 



Urgent Need of Protection for Toyon Berries 



By Bertha M. Rice 



California has her fish and game preserves, her State and 

 national parks, and forests, and other valuable safeguards of the 

 wild. But there are no laws to protect our beautiful wild flowering 

 shrubs and interesting native plants, many of which have become 

 candidates for extermination. The population of California is in- 

 creasing with such rapidity and the cultivation of the land in vast 

 areas is so extensive, that, together with the cutting down of forests 

 and forest fires, the irrigation of deserts, and drainage of marshes, 

 and the numerous grazing herds, they have all but erased the once 

 bewilderingly beautiful gardens of wild blooms. The balance of 

 nature has been sadly disturbed by the rapidity with which the 

 progress of agriculture, the growth of the cities and the ''sub- 

 divisions" have changed the fair landscapes of the Golden State; 

 and the birds and the bees as well as the flowers have been having 

 rather a hard time of it. However, it is not so much the inevitable 

 for which we grieve as it is for the more thoughtless and wholly 

 unnecessary destruction which now threatens practical extermination 

 of some of the more cherished species of our native plants. 



The highways and byways of California, once adorned with 

 multitudinously tinted and fragrant wild blooming things, are being 

 desolated and marred by the throngs of automobilists and out-door 

 enthusiasts, whose appreciation of beauty seems sadly misdirected, 

 to say the least. 



The Toyon, or Christmas Berry, sometimes called wild holly, 

 comes in for more than its share of this sort of vandalism. It is no 

 infrequent sight on Sundays and holidays to see hundreds of auto- 

 mobiles and hikers literally loaded down with branches from these 

 beautiful trees. In their haste to gather and be gone, people fre- 

 quently cut down the trees or twist and hack huge branches from 

 their delicate trunks, thus sadly marring their beauty, if not per- 

 manently injuring the growth. From reports gathered in various 

 localities, we learn that the Toyon trees have been almost obliterated 

 in places, and while there seems to be at present a plentiful supply 

 of red berries in the more remote districts, the increased demand 

 for them, and for other wild shrubs, for holiday decorations, threat- 

 ens in time even these vast reserves. Vendors of wild holly and 

 greenery are having shipped to them daily, and in immense quan- 

 tities, such material from various parts of the State. If this demand 

 increases, and is not regulated, it will, added to the thoughtless exter- 

 mination carried on by motorists and other unthinking people, prac- 

 tically exterminate some of California's most attractive features. 



The birds will miss the berries and the bees will miss the 

 flowers, and the landscape will lack its flame of color to cheer us, 

 and something beautiful will have gone out of our lives something 

 we cannot regain unless we safeguard before too late these happier 

 features of our wild life. 



