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Read these short commentaries first, then match the competing native and non-native plants, objects or events.

1. On Santa Cruz Island, when it was first being ranched in the early 1800s, the ranchers brought an Italian cook to feed the ranch hands. This cook brought seeds of a well known Italian plant, finnochio, with him to grow as a spice and to eat its roots much like we now eat celery. This plant is now known as fennel. It is competing with many native plants on the Channel Islands. Fennel is a lime green plant with tall stalks – up to seven feet tall – with seedy heads that are yellow. Its leaves are a pretty lacey green and tasty to chew on – like licorice. One plant having a hard time fending off the fennel’s invasion is
2. Before the arrival of Europeans, California grasslands and foothills were covered with bunch grasses. These grasses live all year round, have multi-colored blades of grass – green, red, yellow, burgundy - as leaves, and are topped by pretty soft plumes of seeds once a year. The native bunch grasses are less of a fire hazard than the grasses the Europeans imported. One of the most common grasses we see today in California came from the Europeans – oats ! It has blond tassels that wave beautifully in the wind, and a nice aroma in the late evening as the air cools. But, the plant has choked out native bunch grasses over tens of thousands of acres. Other European grasses found all over California include barley and rye. Have you ever gotten a fox tail caught in your socks ? Well, that is a European import – barley.
3. The California poppy is a native plant – and the state flower. It is illegal to gather it in the wild. This law was enacted to help the poppies recover from the effects of massive human developments in our urban areas.
4. The California Redwoods are a truly amazing tree. Some are over 200 feet tall, and 2,000 years old. Nothing short of rock on the earth is as old as these trees. They only way they can reproduce is if their cones are subjected to the intense heat of a forest fire, making it in frequent when they can reproduce even in wilderness settings, much less facing the stringent fire controls of today’s practices. The Pacific Northwest was once 80% covered with redwoods and other trees that grow in what is called the temperate rain forest. Today, only a few hundred acres remain. What happened to these ancestral old growth trees ? They have fallen to the blades of lumber mills.

Plant #1 is a:

And it competes with plant # ______________

Plant #2 is a:

And it competes with plant # ______________

Plants #3 is a:

And it competes with _____________

Plant #4 is a:

And it competes with _____________