Morgan Stickrod ‘s Saturday, July 6th, 5pm talk will highlight the amazing biodiversity and beauty of the native plants of California, a flora we treasure and work hard to protect. He will take a closer look at spring & summer in California; the beautiful wild-flower blooms of California’s spring, which can begin in the supposed winter and go all the way into the summer. This talk will celebrate some of the diversity of this species-rich region in the context of the incredibly varied & complex ecosystems these plants have evolved in: from “the ephemeral blankets of vibrant annuals in deserts of the South to the charismatic unveiling of our many geophytes”.

As a San Francisco native, he’s always been awed by the stark variety of life in the natural areas of California, but when he moved away to Asheville’s University of North Carolina for his BS in Ecology, focusing on plants, he started really appreciating the labyrinthine variations of our landscapes. (see the California Floristic Province map below)

In the So. Appalachians, he worked for the Blue Ridge Parkway developing the permanent herbarium collection and doing rare plant management work. He was also involved in several long-term research projects in Great Smoky Mountains NP studying potential resistance in 2 species of hemlock to the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid.
Morgan is a graduate student at SFSU, investigating seed banks & vegetation dynamics of a brackish tidal marsh in Solano County. He has worked at the SF Botanical Garden for nearly 3 years.