Flowers of Skeleton Canyon

In the 1980s Maarten Chrispeels, a plant biologist at UC San Diego living on Glenwick Lane, walked Skeleton Canyon three times a week for nine months, photographing each plant as it came into flower.

What he assembled is a seasonal record of a single coastal canyon: sixty taxa in thirty-two families, arranged as he arranged them, family by family, with the names he used at the time. Most of the introduced species he left out on purpose.

The canyon, which forms part of the UC San Diego ecological reserve, is still there today. So, for the most part, is the flora below — coastal sagebrush, black sage, California buckwheat, bush mallow, deer weed, coast cholla: the ordinary, particular assemblage of Diegan coastal sage scrub.

This record shows what an incredibly rich ecosystem our canyon contains, even if part of it is degraded. Maarten J. Chrispeels

60Taxa

32Families

80Photographs

9Months

The canyon

Skeleton Canyon lies between Allen Field and the Birch Aquarium. It forms part of UC San Diego’s Ecological Reserve, and is home to a great many native plants and to the federally protected California gnatcatcher.

The botanist

Maarten J. Chrispeels spent his career on the inside of plant cells — how legume seeds build their storage proteins, and how water crosses plant membranes through the channels called aquaporins. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology at UC San Diego, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1996.

He joined the university’s newly established Department of Biology in 1967 and stayed more than four decades. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1973 and an inaugural fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists, directed the San Diego Center for Molecular Agriculture from 1996 to 2006, and advised the President of Chile on the Millennium Science Initiative for twelve years. He has also co-founded two biotechnology companies, among them Arterra Bioscience, established in Italy in 2010 to develop plant-derived products.