Walking Waterhoods: Garber Park — Temescal Creek Watershed Preview

Garber Park was originally part of Judge John Garber's backyard. Judge Garber moved to San Francisco in 1857 and because an famous attorney and jurist. For a time he was a judge on the Nevada Supreme Court, but he returned to California and built his mansion in 1888, on the site which is now the Claremont Hotel. His heirs offered this hillside to the City of Berkeley on the condition that it be maintained as a park in their father's name. In 1952, the City of Berkely deeded the park to the City of Oakland as it was determined the park was mostly within Oakland's city limits.

Often it is the work of private citizens that keeps a wide variety of Oakland Parks in working order, as park funding often gets diverted elsewhere in the city budget. Enter Garber Park Stewards in 2010. With the important goals of reducing the risk of wildfires, improving the trails, and removing invasive species -- including vast swaths of Himalayan blackberry, Cape ivy, and French broom. In doing so, they have exposed Harwood Creek, as well as the large stone fireplace gathering area. Shelagh Brodersen and Lech Naumovich (top row) pass on the reins of the Garber Park Stewards in 2022 to Ruby Soto Cardona and Wyllie Clayson. If you'd like to contribute your time or money, you can find their info at: http://garberparkstewards.blogspot.com/

Why do you think this dense patch of ferms and trilliums exists among the invase ivies? This is the work of Garber Park Stewards who have identified areas of fern diversity and restored them by removing invasives and using tranplant techniques and seeing to re-establish native flora. The ferns have been liberated from the invasive ivy.

Although this historic fireplace has been well known for many decades, only in 2011 was the extensive stone patio uncovered during a restoration workday. What you see today was built by area Boy Scouts in the 1920's for meetings and camping activities.

Temescal Creek in Garber Park is directly impacted by stormwater produced in the Claremont Hills neighborhood. What does that mean? Stormwater is simply rainwater that is fairly clean hitting a hard surface, such as pavement in sidewalks and streets and runs across that hardscape pickting up pollutants such as car effluents like motor oil and steering fluid as well as microplastics from tires full of chemicals. Feces from animals and humans is also a major source of pollution in stormwater. As stormwater enters the watershed through stormdrains routed into former and current streambeds, it carries the pollutants with it, therby contaminating soil and water running thorugh this section of Garber Park. This is why Wholly H2O focused so much on encouraging the resuction of stormwater by increasing rainwater collection and "planting rain" through berms and swales.

As you stand on the edge of the switchback, look towards the interior of the park. The oaks create dense shade allowing a rich understory of sword ferns on the forest floor. This represens a healthy forest where invasive plants are limited and native plants provide homes for many birds including the oak titmouse, a small grey bird with a pointed crest that mates for life, often living in crevices in oak trees.

Aesculus californica, commonly known as the California buckeye or California horse-chestnut, is a small tree native to California and southern Oregon. You will usually see their branches coated with mosses and lichens. Their nuts produce a toxin which is poisonous to bees and humans. Native Americans often used the poisonous nuts and seeds to stupefy fish in small streams to make them easier to catch. In hard times, they could also be used as a food source and ground into meal after boiling and leeching the toxin our of the nut meats for several days. The stand you see here has a deep root structure and helps prevent soil erosion on this steep hillside.

This area of the buckeye grove is covered with lichens, which are said to cover 6-7% of all the trees and rock on Earth. There are thousands of variety of lichens, but they are composite organisms — that is, they are actually communities of a type of algae and a type of fungus that exist together as a single unit. They can exist in the harshest arctic and desert environments, but are very sensitive to air pollution since they get much of their nutrients from the air itself. For this reason, lichens have been used as inexpensive pollution indicators. Some lichens actually break down the rock they are attached to, thus eroding it and creating soil.

Toxicodendendron diversilobum is known as Pacific poison oak or Western poison oak, even though it isn't closely related to the trees. It's leaves and stems produce an oil called urushiol, which is an allergen to 80% of people and causes the rash poison oak is so famous for. It's a staple food to many birds an forest fauna, as most animals are immune to its ill effects, including dogs. Its smoke is a particular hazard to firefighters when forests burn. Coastal Native Americans had a wide variety of uses for the plant, including drinking a tea preparation that helped make them immune to its toxin. The Ohlone weaved baskets from its stems, and its sap and ashes worked well as a black pigment for their weaving or tattoo ink.

What are the mechanisms that actually create creeks and rivers? Generally, whether the initial flow is from a spring or from rainwater pouring down the hill, a creek grows as it moves downhill. As you walk through this park, you'll notice mini watersheds inside this larger watershed that feed additional water into the creek as it moves further and further down the hill, which is why creeks and rivers are much larger at the mouth than at the headwaters, in addition to water spreading out when moving from a steep area to flat land.

How adorable! The Oak Titmouse (Baeolophus inornatus) is a small gray-brown bird that dwells along the coast of California down into Mexico. It has a crest that can be raised or lowered. Until 1996, all titmice were considered the same species, but the Ornithologists' Union seperated them based on habitat and differences in their calls. These are found here because of the number of oak trees surrounding you.

The benches throughout this park are made from trees and materials in the park itself. There's no reason to import new material when plentty exists where you are!

What looks different about this area? Is it sunnier, wetter, or cooler than the previous section of the trail? This area is dominated by horsetail a plant that looks like a bottlebrush. This vascular plant reproduces by spores rather than seeds, a reproductive strrategy also used by mushrooms. Horsetail is a "living fossil" as it is the only living genus of the entire class of Equisetopsidea. This plant dominated the understory of Paleozoic forest more than 100 million years ago.

Oregon ash reaches the edge of its North American coastal distribution on the cool slopes and creeks of the Bay Area. The leaves of this tree are described as pinnately compound. Can you find all the seedlings around? What about the parent trees?

Often we don't see the species such as mammals while we're out in our yards or hiking. So how can we know there? We often "see" other species by what they have built or left behond. In this case, rather than discovering prints in wet mud, we can look iup and see a squirrel's nest, and know that they built this large leafy nest, which can contain lots of other matierials such as fabric and stuffing from porch pillows. So when you are walking outdoors, try to notice what other creatures have left behind and see if you can deter mine who it was, when it was and why they were here.

Pineapple Sage is a variety of Saliva elegans, a shrub native to Mexico, and is so named because when it flowers it smells like pineapple! If you're fortunate enough to be walking through here in the autumn, keep a lookout for their bright red, tubular flowers, a favorite of hummingbirds.

Umbellularia californica is a tree that goes by many names: Oregon myrtle, headache tree, balm of heaven, sō-ē’-bä (Concow tribe) and California bay laurel. Though its fruit, nuts, and leaves have been used as medicine, food, and for pest control, it differs from common bay laurel leaves, in that these leaves have a toxin that makes them unsuitable for cooking. It also has the distinction of being the only wood still in use as a base "metal" for legal tender. In 1933, there was a cash flow crisis, and a bank in Oregon produced wooden coins as temporary money. Since many people didn't hand them in, the bank has delcared that it will continue to honor them at face value.

You now stand amoung 100-200 year old coast live oaks. Notice how quiet is it here, how little sound travels from urban spaces to this location. Oaks are well known to serve as sound barriers. Although this grove may not currently harbor Sudden Oak Death (SOD) infection, the pathogen is rapidly infecting much of the Bay Area. SOD infects and kills many species and has forever changed Bay Area forests. Some forest stands have experienced greater than 80% tree mortality.

As you exit the grove, you may hear a surprising sound: water flowing. A small but important perennial creek wanders throuh Garver, crossing the trainl at a location known as Bob's place. This is the site of a effort to restore native vegetation and ecological resilience. Once overgrown with invasive blackberry, this site is now rich with native plants including ferns, native berry shrubs and more.

Notice the blackened scars on the oak tree. These serve as an important reminder of the past and the role of fire even in the wettest ecosystems. Fire is an important ecological process, but is often in conflict with human communities.

“At the time a tree dies, it has only partially fulfilled its potential ecological function,” writes Dr. Jerry Franklin, a leading forest ecologist from the University of Washington. Part of the biodiversity crisis faced globally is rooted in ecosystem simplification -- basically when humans clean up wild areas and control what grows and doesn’t. Dead or dying trees, known as snags when upright, or logs once they have fallen, become homes for ants, beetles and other wood-boring invertebrates become meals for many birds. Birds other cavity nesters, view snags not only as a food source, but also as a place to take up residence and nest. Here we see the importance of leaving snags and logs as part of the delicate balance of life present in the park.

The California Towhee looks for food by dragging its feet through leaves and twigs with a distinctive two-legged backward hop.

There are so many things to love about the Big Leaf Maples (Acer macrophyllum) in Garber Park, an original inhabitant of this canyon. They are the tallest maple reaching a towering 100' and the leaves can be 12" around. This maple is "monoecious", meaning each tree is both male and female and can self pollinate. Squirrels, chipmunks, and birds like the evening grosbeak eat its seeds. The maple also serves as quite a substrate (base material) for many other forms of life such as mosses, lichens, and ferns, particularly in wetter zones like Garber Park. Demonstrating hte interaction of systems, the mats of the additional plants growing on maples itself created more are for other forms of life to grow on, such as invertebrates. When big piles of the mixture of plants falls to the ground, it's decomposition builds nutrient rich soil.