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| Mustard at Crystal Cove State Park, Laguna Beach (Photo by author) |
Mustard plants are a non-native invader in California and didn’t arrive in the way legends suggest.
According to lore, a Spanish friar, traveling between the missions, planted mustard seeds along the way, marking El Camino Real with yellow flowers. (In some versions of the story, the Franciscan in question is even cited as having been Fr. Junipero Serra!) It's all very romantic, but extremely unlikely.
Neither was the mustard planted to feed cattle -- Another recurring origin tale. Cattle don't like the stuff.
More likely, mustard was grown as a crop at the missions (for its oil, if not for culinary purposes) and quickly spread out of control. As early as 1827, Capt. José María Estudillo, reporting on Mission San Juan Capistrano, wrote that mustard made most of the land useless, and that “There is so much of it that it cannot be destroyed by human means.”
And for anyone still suffering under the misapprehension that mustard is native to the area, historian Eric Plunkett notes that the Indigenous peoples "had words for every plant that grew here. They did not have a word for mustard."
Today, mustard continues to strangle out native plants. It may taste good on hot dogs, but it’s also a mistake California will never forget.
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| Mustard in the dry season, Loma Ridge, Irvine (Photo by author) |
1 comment:
Public reaction to these articles always surprises me. No other post on my blog has generated more reader dissent. Most are SURE the old legend about the padres marking El Camino Real is true because "Dad told me," or "my fourth grade teacher told me."
To borrow a line from Young Frankenstein: "Well, they were wrong then, weren't they?"
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