Sowing Dissent

CRYSTAL COVE STATE PARK — The bicyclist first noticed a peculiar problem two years ago as he commuted past one of Orange County’s most spectacular sweeps of ocean.

His view of the Pacific was shrinking day by day, inch by inch, as leafy shrubs sprang up along more than 2 miles of highway. A form of saltbush called Atriplex lentiformis was taking over the roadside and soaring as much as 8 feet into the air.

Dale Ghere fought back. No ordinary bicyclist, he is a high school biology teacher who knows his Atriplex and thinks it has no business being planted between Coast Highway and the sea.

“Instead of looking at the ocean,” he said, “you’re looking at straggly plants.”

So began the saga of how one man has gone up against powerful entities like the state parks system, Orange County and Caltrans. He questions why on earth they would sow countless seeds of Atriplex when a native plant guidebook reveals it can grow to a height of 10 feet. His nightmare: a solid 2-mile wall of entwined branches and silver-gray leaves.

This is a saga about botany, government and sheer determination, as Ghere fights to get the plants chopped down. It hints at how seed choices can become as tangled as saltbush boughs when one is dealing with multimillion-dollar road-building projects, government partnerships, salty soil and endangered species laws.

The problem to date remains unsolved. While some saltbush have been felled, many more flourish like a California version of the quick-growing Southern vine kudzu.

Ghere’s campaign raises a curious question about democracy: Do we have an right to the “blue view,” to unobstructed views of the ocean from our bikes and cars?

Disputes proliferate in California over ocean-viewing rights of private homeowners, pitting neighbor against neighbor over sun decks, balustrades and second-story additions.

But the view Ghere is defending is over public land--the spacious bluff tops of Crystal Cove State Park. Viewers are members of the general public traveling along a public road. And the villain is not a balcony-building homeowner but a humble plant with a remarkable ability to grow.

“It’s just the wrong plant in the wrong place,” said Ghere, who moved to Orange County in 1960 to become a Laguna Beach lifeguard because he so loved the ocean and the blue view. A teacher at Corona del Mar High School since 1969, he has sometimes walked to work from his Bluebird Canyon home in Laguna Beach, savoring the view.

Others argue that saltbush is exactly the right plant--hardy, tolerant of salty soils and environmentally correct. Unlike the creeping ice plant that flanks so many highways, saltbush is a bona fide California native.

Saltbush was growing at Crystal Cove long before the Coast Highway road-widening project that sparked the current controversy. That county project widened Coast Highway to six lanes for more than 2 miles between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach, near where the Irvine Co.’s Newport Coast development is now rising.

The project’s 1993 start was delayed several months when the California gnatcatcher was listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. The rare songbird is found in the park’s coastal sage scrub habitat, so road builders agreed to add native plants along the roadside.

A so-called “seed palate” was chosen, with sage-scrub species such as California buckwheat, coast goldenbush, coyote brush, California sage brush, the yellow-flowering California encelia--and, of course, the saltbush.

The county, state parks officials, Caltrans, the Irvine Co. and consultants were all involved in plant discussions, planners recall.

“Everyone was working together,” said David Marshall, manager of the construction division of the county’s Public Facilities and Resources Department, who remembers people agreeing to the plant choice.

One project consultant, restoration ecologist Bill O’Connell, bristles at Ghere’s claim that saltbush was the wrong plant.

“My guess is he doesn’t realize the amount of salinity in the soil out there,” said O’Donnell, a biologist at LSA Associates in Irvine, an environmental consulting firm.

Other plants have struggled to take root in the salty soil, but saltbush is unusually tolerant, making it a good choice, O’Connell said.

“That’s why that species was included. And it was included in a very minor amount,” he said, noting that more saltbush is being added within the park “because it’s the only thing we can get to grow.”

O’Connell said another consultant drew up the seed list but that he agreed to it. Preserving native habitat for the gnatcatcher was also kept in mind, he said.

Even with the saltbush, the Crystal Cove view has not changed much, O’Connell said. During construction, nonnative plants such as tree tobacco, castor bean and big eucalyptus trees were removed, he said.

Seeding was done at the project’s close, and Ghere remembers first spotting foot-tall saltbush in early 1996. He complained to state parks officials.

“I said, do you know what you’re growing?” he recalled. The response: “Who are you? Where are you coming from? This thing was done by professionals.”

The saltbush kept growing, bunching up in some areas to form a thick hedge. Ghere kept talking to the state Department of Parks and Recreation, Caltrans and the county.

Finally, he recruited some of his Corona del Mar High School students for a saltbush-clearing project, with parks officials’ approvals. They fought to clear some of the tangled, woody plant just a year ago. The parks department followed with a crew that cut down much of the roadside plant.

But the determined saltbush came back.

“Some of it’s gone from ground level right up to 7 feet,” Ghere said. He keeps photos of the plant’s development, including one showing him posed by a plant with an 8-foot stick.

David Pryor, a parks resource ecologist, said Ghere has raised a good point.

“I think he’s dead on,” Pryor said. “Apparently, there was an abundance or even an overabundance of Atriplex seeds, so it had an advantage over the other plants.”

But the cash-strapped parks department lacks the funds for an aggressive saltbush-removing campaign. So it is removing the plant at key points, such as where it blocks views from park exit roads or particularly dramatic ocean settings.

“Not all of it will come down. We just feel it’s at too high a density,” Pryor said.

Ironically, the Irvine Co. has sharply curtailed the saltbush from its side of Coast Highway, across from the park, after complaints from Caltrans that it was growing into the road.

“It was just growing like crazy,” spokesman Paul Kranhold said.

Ghere has a meeting scheduled with parks officials on Feb. 23 to discuss the future of its saltbush. He says he understands that its removal could be a slow process.

“I just want to make sure that something goes down in black and white somewhere that they’ll work on these plants and keep this view as open as possible,” he said.

At the park, Pryor agrees that the view needs to be preserved: “God, it’s the edge of the continent. It’s magnificent.”

But when you plant seeds, sometimes the unexpected happens.

“You don’t always know what you’re going to get when you lay something on the ground,” Pryor said. “It’s not an exact science.”

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Problem Plant

Coast saltbush, planted in 1996, has grown sufficiently to block some ocean views along Coast Highway near Crystal Cove State Park. More about the plant:

* Also known as quail bush (Atriplex lentiformis)

* Grows 3 to 10 feet high and 6 to 12 feet wide, with many dense branches

* Sports silver-gray oval leaves, 1 to 2 inches long, which feel mealy when rubbed

* Blooms July through November with small greenish flowers clustered along its branches

* Bears fruits resembling disks, quarter of an inch long, giving the plant its name, lentiformis, meaning “shaped like a lens”

* Native plant found in the coastal sage scrub habitat, home of the threatened California gnatcatcher

* Like other saltbush types, has unusual tolerance for salty seashore conditions or alkaline soils; sometimes used as hedge or windbreak

Sources: “Flowering Plants of the Santa Monica Mountains,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Researched by DEBORAH SCHOCH / Los Angeles Times