Botany

James Cameron's science-fiction blockbuster "Avatar" takes place in 2154 on the lush moon Pandora. To help make the set believable, Jodie Holt, chairwoman of the department of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, was approached to consult on the film's plant life, as well as how a botanist would study such flora. Holt, a plant physiologist, talked about her involvement in the film and the "Pandorapedia," a detailed catalog of the moon's features, including its many plants. How did you become involved in the film?

James Cameron's science-fiction blockbuster "Avatar" takes place in 2154 on the lush moon Pandora. To help make the set believable, Jodie Holt, chairwoman of the department of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, was approached to consult on the film's plant life, as well as how a botanist would study such flora. Holt, a plant physiologist, talked about her involvement in the film and the "Pandorapedia," a detailed catalog of the moon's features, including its many plants. How did you become involved in the film?

There is an obscure herb that grows along the cliffs in a remote Hawaiian cloud forest, one of the rainiest and most inaccessible places in the world. Botanist Michael Doyle became fascinated with this herb as a graduate student, but to study it he had to get to the cloud forest. And to get to the cloud forest--higher in elevation than a rain forest--he had to take risks not usually associated with plant gathering.

Based on Michael Pollan's book of the same name, "The Botany of Desire," airing tonight on PBS, looks at the ways in which plants have advanced their agenda, metaphorically speaking, by making themselves attractive to humans. There is a lot of speaking in metaphors in the two-hour documentary, much of it by Pollan himself, who regularly takes pains to remind us that he is, in fact, speaking metaphorically, because we have no words to describe the psychology of species beside our own. Besides, a little anthropomorphizing can be a useful thing when you're telling a story, especially when the moral is that we are all in this together, plants and people and every living thing, and so mutually dependent that it's impossible to tell the user from the used.

Cowabunga floribunda? Could the gardens of a regal Beverly Hills estate be of interest to a pack of energetic children weaned on Ninja Turtles and Terminators? Judging from the Virginia Robinson Gardens' plan for a hands-on tour for third-graders, they will. What's a fancy garden anyway but an excuse for big people to dig in the dirt? The Robinson Gardens, a historic 6.

In the centuries-old scuffle over Malibu Creek State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains, stubborn outsiders like milk thistle and black mustard have racked up a long winning streak. Theoe nonnative plants have nearly conquered the northeast corner of the park, driving out the indigenous grasses that once carpeted valley floors. But park ecologist Suzanne Goode wants to even the score.

The San Fernando Valley spineflower, until recently considered extinct, will not be declared an endangered species on an emergency basis, according to federal officials. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials cited staff and budget shortfalls in announcing they will not be able to come to a decision on the spineflower--found last year on land earmarked for the Ahmanson Ranch project--within the one-year period mandated by federal law.

One bottle contains parts of an orchid from pre-revolutionary Cuba, another a lily from some threatened corner of the African rain forest, a third the bark of trees ripped out of the ground 50 years ago when a hurricane slammed into Rhode Island. There are 6,000 such specimens of plant life, each held in a short-necked bottle topped with a fat cork covered in plastic and tied with a string.

This is California as America knows it. Sun-dappled hills of golden grasses undulate into the distance, dotted with herbs and occasional wildflowers. It is the kind of landscape made famous in old Western films, when the cowboys galloped their horses through the chaparral. Now here's the real story of this wild-land vista: Most of the rippling gold grasses came from Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco. That thick patch of pale green fennel is an insidious intruder from Southern Europe.

Tramping through the El Segundo sand dunes in the spring of 1932, botanist Bonnie C. Templeton came across a strange-looking plant that didn't appear in any of her botany books. She named her discovery Pholisma paniculatum for the tiny flower clusters that appeared on the surface of the sand. But when a well-known botanist published a book on the flora of Southern California a few years later, he refused to recognize her find.

Who would have thunk? A dry Muscat from Malaga in southern Spain, better known for its luscious sweet wines? And yet Spanish wine importer Jorge Ordonez and the late, great sweet wine producer Alois Kracher had the idea to try making a little dry wine from the old Muscat vineyard Ordonez located in the mountains outside the city. This, the third vintage of Botani Sierras de Malaga Moscatel Seco, is a perfect summer aperitif wine.

Scientists announced Monday the discovery of a rare new orchid species that flourishes only in the wet meadows of a beloved portion of Yosemite National Park. Botanist Alison Colwell said the species' minute, tennis-ball-yellow flowers weren't what first led her to it, but rather the smell of sweaty feet that the Yosemite bog orchid emits to attract would-be pollinators. "I was out surveying clovers one afternoon, and I started smelling something. I was like, 'Eew! What's that?'

PAINTING flowers, that favorite pastime of Victorian women, sounds like a sedate occupation. Lisa Pompelli, a botanical illustrator for the Huntington Botanical Gardens since 1977, disagrees. "Before the camera," she says, "there were all those voyages of discovery to Africa and Asia, bringing back exotic plants. Sometimes the illustrator was on the boat. It was dark, they were trying to paint these flowers that were rotting, there were flies."

Dennis Desjardin tenderly plucks a delicate brown cupped mushroom, small enough to be Tom Thumb's goblet, that is growing in the debris of a soggy field of young corn lilies. "Isn't that fantastic?" says Desjardin, pinching the stem of the dripping little fungus in the high Sierra sunlight. "They're so charismatic, how could you not love them?" The inconspicuous little mushroom Desjardin is holding is yet another new discovery.

On a recent walk in a local state park, apprentice botanist Michael Park spotted a plant that everyone thought was extinct. Now scientific mania over the tiny pink wildflower has quickly reached full bloom. Park stumbled across Eriogonom truncatum -- a wispy six-inch plant described as a pink version of the baby's breath used in floral arrangements. The delicate plant, commonly known as the Mount Diablo buckwheat, was last seen in 1936.

Half a century later, a motorist's kindness to a hitchhiker is remembered beneath a shady grove of oaks, alders and sycamores next to a rock-strewn streambed and roaring waterfall. The tiny slice of wilderness in Agoura Hills is marked with a hand-hewn wooden sign that proclaims it to be the "Lee Haines Garden of Native Plants of the Santa Monica Mountains." "Lee changed my life," says Edward Gripp. "I owe so much to him."

Ask a philosopher why we name things, and the reply will be: human nature. It's how we distinguish a chair from a couch, a pond from an ocean, them from us. First among the things we learned to name were plants. Our long evolution would have been a very short one had we not found ways to, say, differentiate hemlock from basil. Yet while all people in all places name plants that they use, it took the discovery of the New World to inspire the idea that one could or should classify all plants.

PAINTING flowers, that favorite pastime of Victorian women, sounds like a sedate occupation. Lisa Pompelli, a botanical illustrator for the Huntington Botanical Gardens since 1977, disagrees. "Before the camera," she says, "there were all those voyages of discovery to Africa and Asia, bringing back exotic plants. Sometimes the illustrator was on the boat. It was dark, they were trying to paint these flowers that were rotting, there were flies."

Ask a philosopher why we name things, and the reply will be: human nature. It's how we distinguish a chair from a couch, a pond from an ocean, them from us. First among the things we learned to name were plants. Our long evolution would have been a very short one had we not found ways to, say, differentiate hemlock from basil. Yet while all people in all places name plants that they use, it took the discovery of the New World to inspire the idea that one could or should classify all plants.

The art establishment is reeling over internecine shake-ups in the Getty Center administration, but playfulness still rules in the Getty garden. Since his first meeting a decade ago with the antically witty garden's visionary creator, Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin, horticulturist Jim Duggan has been collaborating on the cultural must-see. His recent book, "Plants in the Getty's Central Garden" (J. Paul Getty Museum, $19.