Tehachapi News

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I recently happened upon one of the most beautiful wildflowers I’ve ever found growing in the Tehachapi area. For the first time ever, I encountered a tall plant whose waxy flowers featured curving yellowish-orange petals accented with maroon spots. Growing in a meadowy area of Blackburn Canyon in the Old West Ranch, this was a single specimen of a plant known as a Sierra Lily (Lilium kellyanum).
Sierra Lilies are generally found from 6,000 feet and higher in the Sierra Nevada mountains and nowhere are they abundant. The great botanist/rancher Ernest Twisselman had heard a couple of reports of this plant being found in Kern County, but during his nine years of collecting every plant species within Kern’s 8,000 square miles, he was unable to find a single example.
I’m not sure how this lone plant came to be growing in Blackburn Canyon, but it’s been there for years since it was flowering, and Sierra and other wild lilies can take 5-7 years of growth before they bloom for the first time.
Plants are often divided into two groups: dicots and monocots. The dicots, which have a pair of initial seed leaves that appear when the plant germinates, are by far the larger group and includes most familiar plants. The monocots, on the other hand, have a single leaf that appears and includes the grasses, rushes, sedges, horsetails, lilies and a few others.
Meadows are one of the few areas where monocots tend to dominate, and the meadow where this gorgeous lily was growing included extensive stands of Deergrass, Common Rush, Nut Sedge and other grass-like monocots.
I plan on returning to this Sierra Lily, which is also known as Kelly’s Sierra Lily or Sierra Tiger Lily, to collect some seed in the hopes of propagating this particular specimen. Lilies are slow to mature, as I mentioned earlier, but once they get established they form a perennial bulb and can grow for decades. Apparently Sierra Lilies were once more common but have been depleted by grazing practices and collection by gardeners who first started digging up the bulbs in the late 1800s.
If I can get some young ones to grow from this Tehachapi specimen it would be satisfying to make them available both for planting in the wild to increase their numbers and for local native garden enthusiasts.
Numerous California Mule Deer fawns have been appearing in the Tehachapi area over the past few weeks with their spotted coats, oversized ears and delicate pointed hooves. Most will outgrow the little fawn stage but it is a very vulnerable and dangerous time for them.
Mark and Diana Ricker and their girls found an injured fawn at their house last week and my brother and I tried to assist it but it was too badly injured (it suffered a punctured lung) and it was humanely euthanized by a compassionate vet at the Tehachapi Veterinary Hospital.
Just a reminder: seeing a fawn by itself does not necessarily mean that it has been abandoned — an attentive mother is often waiting and watching from a concealed location, and you should resist the urge to intervene unless you are positive that the doe is not coming back.
Summer is firmly established in Tehachapi now with our typical “highs in the 80s, lows in the 60s” weather pattern, though last week’s little heat wave did push temperatures into the 90s and even over 100 in some of our microclimates. Wildfire is a clear and present danger for the next few months and I urge all residents to be especially careful and to think about fire safety whenever you’re in the wildlands — which for many locals is just outside their door.
Have a good week.