San Bruno State Park

San Bruno State Park serves as a landmark of local and regional significance. The park is in the midst of the peninsula’s urbanization at the northern end of the Santa Cruz Mountain Range. The park is home to vast diversity of flowering and fruit-bearing native and non-native plants.

Blog Link: San Bruno State Park

Mount Tamalpais

Mount Tamalpais is found in the heart of Marin County. It has deep canyons and hillsides cloaked with cool redwood forests, oak woodlands, open grasslands and sturdy chaparral. It is the highest peak in Marin hills, which are part of the Northern California Coast Ranges. Because of its elevation and location’s proximity to the ocean and bay, Mount Tamalpais contains many microclimates, ranging from cool and foggy in lower ocean-facing valleys with their redwood forests, to hot and dry on the manzanita slopes, cool and breezy at the summit and shady on the heavily Douglas-fir forested slopes.

Blog Link: Mount Tamalpais

San Pedro Valley Park

We left the USF campus at around 1:00 in the afternoon. We arrived in San Pedro Valley Park at around 1:40pm. At the park, the weather was cold but there were some sun. We started our hike and went to Riparian river where we observed a handful of native plants. We saw three different genus species of Trillium that were by each other. We kept on going with the hike, which took about two hours. We encountered many native plants on the way up and when we finally got to the top, it started to drizzle. Unfortunately it started pouring, so this hike was definitely the most challenging (traumatizing). However, this park was definitely a good place to observe native California plants.

Click the link to view full blog: San Pedro Valley Park

Mount Burdell

 

We left USF campus before 1pm and arrived in Mt Burdell at 1:45pm. The view throughout the drive was beautiful. At Mt Burdell, which is in the Marin county, the weather was definitely colder and had stronger winds. Thus, it was really chilly during this field trip. Everyone was freezing and struggling to write our notes on plants that we were learning about. I was surprised to see such diversity of plants since I didn’t expect grasslands with some serpentine areas to have beautiful and rare plants. The hike was more of a walk so other than the cold and windy weather, everything was very good.

Blog link: Mount Burdell

San Francisco Botanical Garden

 

My friend Jessica and I walked to the park at around 1:30 in the afternoon on Monday. It was really cold but there were still a lot of people outside and at the garden. We focused on California native plants, and when we got there we were a bit disappointed. Most of the plants were deciduous, dead and did not have flowers. Compared to temperate Asia and Africa, the California native plants were not as eye pleasing. However, we still saw some really beautiful native plants.

Link: Botanical Garden Blog