Flora of the Briones Hills
by Ann Drevno, Ph.D.
I come from a family of runners. I spent many days of my youth and beyond traversing the rolling Briones hills adjacent to my childhood home. The same hills Jerold Turner chose to put down his easel and paint in Mount Diablo Portal. For most, relationships with land and landscapes are experiential, bodily, and perhaps even spiritual. I come back to these hills in my adulthood, often with a child or two in tow — back to their warmth, back to Mount Diablo’s steadfast anchor in the distance, back to the golden (in summer) and green (in winter) hills that held my long-dried sweat and deep breaths.
For me, this painting evokes a deep personal connection to the landscape, but it also evokes questions. Raised by two high school teachers, activists, and outdoor enthusiasts, one who taught an array of A.P. history and politics courses, the other who founded the district’s Environmental Science program, I was trained from an early age to move through the world with the most basic of socio-political, environmental, and equity-oriented questions:“What are healthy relationships between society and nature? What is my role in them? And, how did such stark inequities in access to healthy environments come to be?”
My role as Saint Mary’s Sustainability Director allows me to dive into these and related questions: How do we steward the land and resources, both at Saint Mary’s and beyond, to sustain the health of our ecosystems and society? How do we ensure equitable access to healthy environments and spaces? What are conceptions and misconceptions of ‘natural’ environments?
Mount Diablo Portal embodies several of these questions and struggles. The carbon-emitting freeway cutting through the peace and beauty of the ‘natural’ foreground. Mount Diablo’s complicated history of land grabbing, stewardship, and complex discussions of conservation vs. preservation. Questions of who has access to and ownership of these spaces. While I cannot pick apart each of these complicated ethical dilemmas (perhaps fodder for a future Jan Term course?), I chose to focus this piece on the natural history of the hills Turner chose to lay his easel. Exploring native and non-native flora in these hills allows us to understand organisms in their environment and the role humans have played in shaping that environment. I have collected and pressed several plants from these hills; a limited number displayed here. Next to each is some information (e.g., botanical names, history, medicinal values, harvesting tips, etc.) to ground us in the physical environment in which Turner painted Mount Diablo Portal.
Ann Drevno is the Sustainability Director at Saint Mary’s College of California. “Flora of the Briones Hills,” is created in collaboration with Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art exhibition Interdisciplinary Voice. On view through December 11, 2022 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. For more information visit our website.
