From Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZYX news for Monday, February 15th. I’m Lana Cohen. 

“So we are standing in a section of Jackson State Forest that basically is vegetated by Mendocino Cyprus and another name for that is the Pygmy Cyprus and what people have kind of called this area is the Pygmy Forest, what we botanists call it is the …” 

Only 2,000 acres of Pygmy ecosystem remains on the planet, and all of it lies along the Mendocino and northern Sonoma Coasts. The Pygmy Forest is made up of grey scraggly trees that look no older than 10 to 15 years are no thicker than the handle of a broomstick, and no taller than the average adult. But the trees in the Pygmy Forest are not young, some are more than one hundred years old. So why are they so small? 

Decades ago, rare plants botanist Teresa Sholars moved to the Mendocino Coast and set out to answer that question. 

“It’s kind of an anachronism for someone to live and work and retire in the same spot. I’m 68 I moved here when I was 22. Raised three kids here, but I’ve always felt that certainly as a botanist or ecologist the best thing in the world for me is to, if you stay in one place you get to really know it. And each decade I would kind of pick a new group of organisms and try to figure them out. I never took mushroom or lichen classes. I just studied them and started teaching these different groups, natural history, insects, mammals, amphibians. So that has really created a challenge and wonder of all of the different ecosystems here, being able to be here for so many years, because it takes a long time to learn this stuff and appreciate it and understand all the diversity that’s in one locality.” 

Sholars is a leading expert on a range of Mendocino Coast ecosystems. Not only has she researched them, she’s spent almost fifty years walking through the sunny Pygmy Forest, foraging for mushrooms under the dark, cool cover of Redwoods, admiring wildflowers on the bluffs that overlook the Pacific. 

“And that’s what’s so fantastic about California. If you go back east you have often the same rock, the same topography, the same rainfall, the same climate for miles. Here you go from 50 degrees at the ocean in July to 100 degrees just 10 miles inland or 8 miles inland. You have hotspots of different soils and different rocks so we have an enormous amount of diversity here of vegetation and plants and animals and fungi that have evolved in those diverse habitats. So the magic really started because of the diversity of rock types, topography and climate that we have here in California.” 

Although Sholars has explored many of the County's microclimates, the Pygmy forest is the ecosystem she knows best and the one she is most attached to. It’s the one that first called her to this corner of the world. 

When Sholars was in her early 20s, she decided to study Mendocino’s Pygmy forest for her masters degree.

“Well I think in reality a lot of us decide what to study because we want to go to a place that’s really nice and there I am living in Davis and you know this was a very unusual vegetation and everybody who studied it only studied the soils and not the plants so my late husband and I both chose the Pygmy forest as a place we could drive to from Davis in three or four hours, come here camping and study why the plants were so short because nobody knew. Anything that’s unstudied and unknown is fun for people to try to figure things out.”

To discover why the Pygmy’s trees were so short, Teresa decided to dig deep. Literally, she dug thousands of holes in the soil in order to find out what was going on in there and how it might be impacting the trees. The thing was, she couldn’t get very far. Again and again, about a foot and a half down, she hit something solid. She found that the soil under the pygmy forest is hardpan, which means that you can’t get through it. Hardpan is created when the ground is flat, so rather than soil moving and flowing over years with storms and wind, it stays put and consolidates, becoming concrete-like. 

Ultimately, Sholars found that the soil’s tough, rock-like nature is not the main reason the Pygmy trees are stunted, but it is related to why the trees

 in the pygmy are minutature

“If you ever hike around the Mendocino Coast or in Northern California, most areas are basically steep and upland, you go up and down. Well in this small area that’s really just a few miles long between Northern Sonoma county at Salt Point there’s a few areas where when the land was uplifted it was uplifted flat .” 

Uplift is when the surface of the earth is slowly pushed upwards. The flat uplift in this area is also why the Mendocino Coast has cliff-like bluffs that lead to the ocean rather than mountains that slope into the Pacific. 

“So you can walk in these Pygmy Forests for really miles and it’s flat land.” 

The floor of the Pygmy Forest, which was uplifted by tectonic forces an estimated 500,000 years ago, has never been tipped one way or another or deeply fractured. Consequently, the surface of the ground has sat, flat and exposed to the elements for half a million years, which is 200,000 - 300,000 years before modern humans appeared on the planet. Over time, this exposure leached the soil of nearly all its nutrients, making it almost inhospitable for life. But only almost. A small community of plants that now populates the pygmy, bolander pine and the mendocino cyprus among them, seems to make it work.

“Well you can see, this pine here, it only occurs in the Pygmy forest no other place and it only grows from Fort Bragg to the Navarro River.” 

So although the 500,000 year old soil may not be the most hospitable place to put down roots, it creates a unique and cherished ecosystem. 

“Well the older the terrace the older the soil, when you get here and you have soil being half a million to a million years old that’s very unique. It is incredibly rare to have these and any time is rare it will make rare plants, make habitats for rare animals, rare animals then provide food for other species, so it is a whole web of life that is dependent upon the uniqueness of what is here.”

For KZYX news, I’m Lana Cohen. 

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