By Fred Roberts, Rare Plants Botanist
Chaparral Nolina is one of our larger and easily recognized rare plants. It is a robust perennial, with a thick woody underground base or a short woody trunk, with a dense crown of long, often arching, grass-like leaves as much as a meter long and with finely serrate margins. The inflorescence consists of a single scape, typically 1.5-2.0 meters tall, dressed with short, narrowly triangular bracts that are progressively smaller higher on the stem, and topped with a candle flame-shaped inflorescence of relatively small, cream-colored flowers. The plants are dioecious (male and female flowers on different plants). The flowers are in dense clusters, and the fruits are rounded, dry and inflated three-parted capsules a little more than a centimeter long.
Overall, Chaparral Nolina is suggestive of Chaparral Hucca (Hesperoyucca whipplei), with which it is often confused with when plants are not in bloom. Chaparral Yucca, however, lacks any sort of woody trunk or underground mass, and the leaves are rigid and are tapered from the base to a narrow spiny tip that is sharp to the touch (and will prick unassuming hikers in the legs and arms) while Chaparral Nolina leaves are generally flexible and the tips are longer, brown for several centimeters, and the ends are generally not all that sharp to the touch. In bloom, the small size of the nolina flowers, in addition to their high density, makes it easy to separate the two plants. The flower on Chaparral Nolina is typically less than a centimeter wide while in chaparral yucca, the flowers are large, fleshy, 3-6 cm long, and the fruit of chaparral yucca is generally longer than 3 cm.
One usually finds Chaparral Nolina growing in clusters of plants, patches or rings of clones, whereas Chaparral Yucca rosettes are solitary, or perhaps in groups of 2-4. When in groups, they can usually easily be separated by the lack of a woody base and the leaf shape.
Of the three other Nolinas species in San Diego County, only Dehesa Nolina (Nolina interrata) is found fairly close to Chaparral Nolina in the vicinity of the I-8. Dehesa Nolina lacks any above ground trunk and has leaves that are a pale blue-green as compared to more of an olive green for Chaparral Nolina.
Chaparral Nolina is found primarily in central northern San Diego County on gabbro soils along the San Diego/Riverside County border east of the I-15 south to the vicinity of Pala; an isolated site in northwestern Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base; Hellhole Canyon; and a relatively large population found on Viejas Mountain in South County. It is found mostly in Chamise Chaparral and Nolina Scrub. Overall, the species ranges from the Transverse Ranges of Ventura and Los Angeles County south into northwestern Baja California, Mexico, from about 100 to 1,270 meters.
Historically, Chaparral Nolina was lumped under Parry’s Nolina (Nolina parryi). In a 1988 thesis, Jim Dice proposed that plants from the coastal slopes, with shorter scapes and trunks (or without trunks), and narrower leaf bases represented a separate species. The 1993 edition of the Jepson Manual included a brief shout-out under the entry for Parry’s Nolina stating “±coastal plants from WTR (Ventura Co.) and n & w PR that are smaller throughout (exceeds) with n=19, are an undescribed sp.” Chaparral Nolina was formally described by Jim Dice in 1995, so it is a relatively recent addition to the flora of San Diego County.
Jim Dice, in his 1988 Master’s thesis, expressed conservation concerns for this plant. Especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, most of the populations were found in the foothills and mountains ringing the Los Angeles Basin and as much as 80 percent of all known plants were on Orange County’s expansive Irvine Ranch where large swaths were within proposed planned communities and tollway projects. The species was quick to earn a CNPS 1B rank shortly after it was formally described. Today, it carries the California Rare Plant Rank of 1B.2. The risks to the species have diminished with time. While the tollways were built, many of the extensive Irvine Ranch projects eventually became part of Orange County parks. At the time of Jim’s thesis, chaparral nolinawas only known from a few sites near Pala and on Viejas Mountain in San Diego County, and it has since been found in other areas, though mostly in small isolated sites beyond.
So, one obvious feature is missing from my write up. Which family does the genus Nolina belong to? I would usually mention that casually in the opening sentence. It is a bit unclear just where Nolina belongs exactly, and you can tell this by the history of which family the plant has been stuffed into in various floral treatises. iNaturalist for example (following the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s “The Plant List”,which in turn relies on the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) IV arrangement) would have you believe this is a glorified asparagus, a member of the Asparagaceae. Itdoesn’t seem California botanists are quite ready for that. Mostly we are still following Jepson II, which treats Nolina as a member of the butcher’s broom family (Ruscaceae). Noteveryone agreed on that treatment either. In Jepson I, Nolina was just one of many members of the Liliaceae and there are California botanists that still follow that (though their numbers are thinning!). Interestingly, the Jepson I treatment is consistent with the original 1923 Jepson Manual treatment, but then, Liliaceae was the go-to bin for a lot of lily relatives throughout much of botanical history. Munz, in his 1959 and 1974 Flora of Southern California, considered it a member of the agave family (Agavaceae) –this is what I grew up with it as. Anthruser Davidson, in his 1923 Flora of Southern California placed Nolina in the Dracina family (Dracenaceae). And this is just the diversity of homes Nolina has had in the California floras. Whether it is a butcher’s broom, agave, lily, or glorified asparagus, it is a very cool plant.
Photos by Fred Roberts