WHO'S IN A NAME?

Lupinus padre-crowleyi is a ghostly lupine with pale clay-yellow flowers and herbage shrouded in shimmering grayness. I've seen its ghostliness in live plants up Big Pine canyon, and in dried herbarium specimens collected there and elsewhere by Mary DeDecker and others. It is on the California Native Plant Society's list 1B ("rare, threatened, or endangered"), and was declared a "Rare" plant by the State of California in 1981. It is listed federally as a "Species of concern". Its known populations occupy only a few sites at 8000 to over 10,000 feet elevation along the western edge of Inyo County. For nearly a decade (from 1969 to the late 1970s), this Eastern Sierra rarity was known as Lupinus dedeckerae Munz & Dunn, but then it was found to have been named earlier for Father John J. Crowley. Some botanical sources still give it the common name "DeDecker's Lupine" (1), while others call it "Father Crowley's Lupine". It is fitting that these two devoted lovers of the Eastern Sierra and Inyo County should share association with this rare and unusual species. I'll say a few words about the two namees, both well known locally, then delve into the somewhat complex history of this plant's discovery and naming.

Mary DeDecker Photo by her daughter, Joan Busby, taken from an article by Stephen Ingram, "Introducing Mary DeDecker" in the CNPS "Bulletin", vol. 29(4):1-2, 1999.

Mary DeDecker (2) was both an ardent student and champion of the flora of the Eastern Sierra. For half a century she collected specimens and amassed a treasury of information on regional native plants. She was largely self-taught, but made sure to consult frequently with botanical experts, especially at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont (RSA), and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (CAS). Those experts praised her work which greatly raised the botanical awareness of this little studied region. She was a founder of the Bristlecone CNPS chapter. She used its newsletter, in addition to the local newpapers, to sound the alarm when she saw threats to the special flora here. She prodded Inyo County Supervisors and citizens to stand up to the City of Los Angeles when the City was bent on taking so much water from the Valley as to cause severe damage to the natural environment. Mary died in the year 2000, at the age of 91. One manifestation of the love and admiration that persists for her is the new Mary DeDecker Native Plant Garden in Independence, which many members of the Bristlecone chapter have worked on so diligently.

Father John J. Crowley Click on the picture for a SLIDE SHOW of Crowley memorials. Photo from an article by W. Webster, "Tales of the Desert Padre", Holy Cross Magazine, Fall 2000.

Prominent man-made features in the Eastern Sierra keep the Crowley (3) name alive: Crowley Lake; the Father Crowley Viewpoint on the western approach to Death Valley National Park; a monument on Highway 14 where he met his death in his old Ford (which, it is said, he always drove too fast, hurrying to this or that secular or religious appointment in his vast Eastern Sierra parish); and, recently, a mural on a building in Bishop. Though not a botanist, Crowley knew and loved the native plants of the mountains and deserts. In his writings, especially his weekly column "Sage and Tumbleweed" (which he wrote using the pseudonym Inyokel), he frequently referred to the plants that he admired on outings. He consulted the only book dedicated at that time to the desert regions, Coville's "Botany of the Death Valley Expedition", published in 1893; Crowley called it "the most complete survey of the flora of the valley extant". Father Crowley, the "Desert Padre", struggled mightily, and successfully, to enhance the economic base of the Eastern Sierra in the 1930s, primarily by publicizing it as a tourist mecca. Like Mary, he fought the City of Los Angeles over its water policies, to help the disheartened residents out of their depression over the City's depredations. His fatal auto accident occurred in 1940, when he was 48 years old. His legendary life and writings are lovingly presented in the 1997 book, "Desert Padre", by Joan Brooks.

Now to the namers and collectors. Keep in mind that lupines are difficult to classify and to present clearly in a flora. The number of new world lupine species has been suggested to range from 200 to 1000 (4a) (4b), the wide range mainly due to it often being so difficult to nail down distinct species.

The story of the naming of this plant begins with a false start of sorts. The prominent California/Nevada botanist A. A. Heller visited Inyo County in 1906, and, among other things, came away with 6 lupine species, 4 of which he thought were new (5). One, from McGee Meadows west of Bishop, he named L. inyoensis. You won't find it on the list of recognized lupine species in the new Jepson manual (1993), where it is noted as having been incorporated into L. argenteus var. heteranthus. It will be found, though, in earlier California floras by Munz (1959) and Jepson (1920s).

Fast forwarding a bit, Mary DeDecker's first collection of the subject plant came from the North Fork of Big Pine Creek in 1957 (6). She was puzzled as to its identity, but considered it "near inyoensis". She made additional collections of it (in the same region, and also the West Fork of Coyote Creek) through 1976. The type specimen of Lupinus dedeckerae Munz & Dunn was to come from her third collection, made in July of 1968, which Mary had provisionally labelled L. inyoensis.

As it turned out, Mary wasn't the first to collect the plant in the area. Botanists F. W. Peirson (in 1921), Roxana Ferris (in 1934), and John Thomas Howell (in 1947) also collected it along Big Pine Creek. Of the three, only Howell hazarded a guess on its name, thinking it a previously named variety of L. inyoensis. (The highly regarded Howell, of the CAS, was a principal mentor of Mary DeDecker, as readers of earlier essays in this series may recall.)

In September, 1977, Mary sent this note to Howell (11):

The best population yet of Lupinus dedeckerae is from Logging Flat to the top of the ridge north of it, 10,200 feet. That is higher than it has been known before. At the higher elevations it occurs on sagebrush flats or slopes; lower down it is with sagebrush but in open places in forests of Jeffrey pine or lodgepole, sometimes with limberpine. It always seems to be where it gets a little extra moisture percolating down the slope from above. Penstemon papillatus sometimes occurs with it. As far as I know, Big Pine Canyon is still its southerly limit and the north end of Coyote Flats its northerly limit.

Lupinus padre-crowleyi photographed by Dean Taylor Aug 20, 1981 in the Coyote Flat area. Source: CalPhotos, © Dean Taylor

In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, botanist Dean Taylor, who has a long association with Eastern Sierra botany, made 4 separate collections of the plant in the Big Pine Creek and Coyote Flat area. In 1988 he also found it, in a blue-flowered form, along a jeep trail on the Wheeler Ridge (7).

There are two indications of its occurrence in Tulare County, over the crest from Inyo County; an herbarium specimen collected by F. W. Peirson (in 1908) along Golden Trout Creek (a.k.a. Volcano Creek), and a mention in later literature of its occurrence at Summit Meadows (8).

Thus it appears that, except for the Wheeler Ridge and Tulare County cases, most populations occur in the North Fork Big Pine Creek/Coyote Flat region.

The name Lupinus padre-crowleyi was coined in 1945 by the peripatetic lupine specialist Charles Piper Smith (1877-1955), who chased lupines all over North and South America. He also pored over specimens in herbaria far and wide. He had access to the 1921 specimen collected by Peirson, and the 1934 specimen of Ferris, noted above. Based on his study of them, he concluded, in his 1945 paper on Inyo County lupines (9), that they represented a new species. The paper appeared in his somewhat obscure, self-published journal, "Species Lupinorum". However, he didn't convince all botanists of the validity of his determination. The eminent RSA botanist, Phillip Munz, in his 1959 Flora of California, considered Smith's species to be the same as Heller's Lupinus inyoensis, and thus not new. (Munz, like Howell, encouraged and aided Mary DeDecker's efforts in Inyo Co.)

Subsequently, Munz and David B. Dunn (a lupine specialist based at the University of Missouri in Columbia) studied Mary DeDecker's collections, and decided that they represented a distinct and new species. Thus, in 1969, they provided a detailed description, in RSA's journal "Aliso" (10), of what they called Lupinus dedeckerae. They obviously came to the conclusion that the name L. inyoensis did not apply to these plants, but, due to a possible oversight, they failed to reconsider Smith's name.