Qualla: Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:11 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere: Introduction https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve/ Photo credit Marcia Wright, Public domain. In 1941, a botanist named Robert Hoover knelt beside a shallow pool in the hills of Lake County, California, and collected a small, mat-forming plant he had not seen before. It would be named for Lincoln Constance, a distinguished Berkeley botanist who collected samples from the same pool thirty-two years later. For more than half a century, this single vernal pool - a seasonal puddle, really, covering a few acres in the community of Loch Lomond - was the only known home of the Loch Lomond button celery on Earth. Not until the late 1990s did anyone find the plant growing elsewhere, at just two other sites in Lake County and one in Sonoma County. The entire global range of an endangered species could, for decades, be crossed on foot in a few minutes.

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Image: Marcia Wright | Public domain

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/9qbt-eight-acres-for-a-plant-that-exists-almost-nowhere-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere: A Puddle Worth Forty-Six Thousand Dollars https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve/ Photo credit Marcia Wright, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Loch Lomond Vernal Pool Ecological Reserve covers 8.22 acres - about the size of six football fields. It is one of 119 ecological reserves in California's system, a network authorized by the state legislature in 1968 to protect rare plants, animals, and habitats. The button c...

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Image: Marcia Wright | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/9qbt-eight-acres-for-a-plant-that-exists-almost-nowhere-a-puddle-worth-forty-six-thousand-dollars.mp3 0:06 2 full Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere: Mountains, Pines, and Seasonal Water https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve/ Photo credit Marcia Wright, CC BY-SA 3.0. The reserve sits in the southern reaches of Lake County, where the Mayacamas Mountains rise from the California Coast Ranges. Nearby Cobb Mountain, the area's highest peak at 4,722 feet, anchors a landscape of mixed conifer and hardwood forest - ponderosa pine and sugar pine stan...

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Image: Marcia Wright | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/9qbt-eight-acres-for-a-plant-that-exists-almost-nowhere-mountains-pines-and-seasonal-water.mp3 0:06 3 full Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere: Constance's Coyote-Thistle https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve/ Photo credit Marcia Wright, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Loch Lomond button celery, also called coyote-thistle or Constance's coyote-thistle, grows as a prostrate mat - low to the ground, hugging the damp soil of the drying pool edge. Its flowers appear in clusters of white or blue between May and June. After Hoover's 1941 collecti...

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Image: Marcia Wright | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/9qbt-eight-acres-for-a-plant-that-exists-almost-nowhere-constances-coyote-thistle.mp3 0:06 4 full Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere: The Navarretia Puzzle https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve/ Photo credit Marcia Wright, CC BY-SA 3.0. The button celery shares its vernal pool habitat with another endangered species: the few-flowered navarretia, a delicate member of the phlox family with white or blue flowers and stems streaked white and purple. Listed as endangered by both California in 1990 and the federal gov...

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Image: Marcia Wright | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/9qbt-eight-acres-for-a-plant-that-exists-almost-nowhere-the-navarretia-puzzle.mp3 0:06 5 full Eight Acres for a Plant That Exists Almost Nowhere: What Eight Acres Means https://qualla.com/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve/ Photo credit Marcia Wright, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is something both inspiring and sobering about a nature reserve this small. Eight acres is barely a rounding error in the vast system of American public lands. Yet without those eight acres, purchased for less than the price of a modest house, an entire species might have v...

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Image: Marcia Wright | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/9/q/b/t/loch-lomond-vernal-pool-ecological-reserve-wp/9qbt-eight-acres-for-a-plant-that-exists-almost-nowhere-what-eight-acres-means.mp3 0:06 6 full