When I sat down to eagerly watch Season 4 of Stranger Things, I was not planning on thinking about California Native Plants. But only a few moments into the opening sequence of Stranger Things we are shown the characters new life in Southern California. The visual shows the driest of dry hills at the end of dry season (despite it being Spring) and Eleven is narrating a letter to Mike saying she "misses spring flowers" now that they are in Southern California. This visual and description got me thinking right away, "oh great another misrepresentation of nature in Southern California" Why does Hollywood always portray our ecosystem this way?
The show uses this set up so that when Mike comes to visit on Spring Break, he can be shown to be an attentive boyfriend by bringing Eleven a bouquet of midwestern Daffodils (ok definitely not found naturally in California). This midwest flower delivery is a sweet scene but the implication that there were NO spring flowers to enjoy in Southern California left me thinking about how our nature is portrayed as a plantless desert in the media, even media created in LA by people living in LA!
On one hand I get it because I moved here from Florida over a decade ago. Like the character Eleven, I was also stunned by the aridity I had moved into and it took me some time to understand what LA was and wasn’t. It takes getting out to nature parks and the foothills to find the lupines, the mariposa lilies, the monkeyflower, the native sunflowers, the scorpianweed, the flax, the aster, and so many more to fully appreciate the beauty that is all around us here. Just look at all these spring flowers I saw just in 2022!
It takes paying attention as the years pass by to get into the groove of our own unique SoCal seasons. Understanding the beautifully unique adaptations of our chaparral ecosystem is not something new arrivals usually get right away, so I get that this line is written “in character” as someone who has just moved here from the MIdwest. I can understand the newly arrived teenage character but the problem I really have is with the visual that the very grown up Angelino resident editors and producers used to back up Eleven’s words. The distant brown hillside is not what Spring looks like here in Southern California, it is actually the greenest it gets in Socal, and they should know this!
Aren't these TV producers living in LA? This is a petty complaint on one hand but on the other it is exactly why I'm starting this website and accompanying social media accounts. It's the cultural projection of what LA and Southern California are that keep misconceptions of our unique ecosystems alive. If people don't think there are flowers or a natural world in SoCal then how can they care to protect it all?
Southern California doesn’t just have any old spring flowers, we have superblooms. On a good rain year they canpaint the hillsides orange, gold, and purple with fields of golden California Poppies that bring tourists from all over the world. We have highly endemic plants that only grow in certain canyons where unique soils are found on particular mountain ranges. Southern California is not just a brown hill in the Spring! It can often times be this-
(I have personally avoided the superbloom sites because they attract such big crowds... so this is the only photo that isn't mine... but just look at this photo by Nicholas Jensen and how stunning our spring flowers can be. Photo credit for superbloom photo- https://www.nicholasjensenphotography.com/)
This misrepresentation of Southern Californias ecosystems and plant biodiversity leads many to think the whole state looks like this.
Yes, we do have deserts like the Mojave, which expands across National Parks like Death Valley and Joshua Tree and State Parks like Anza Borrego. But seriously, even the desert has stellar spring flowers after the winter rains.
So we would have spring flowers either way! The desert is full of beauty iteself but we aren't all desert, and it is the biodiversity of our ecosystems in SoCal, the chaparral, oak woodlands, pine forest, riparian corridors, marshes, coastal scrub, and sage scrub that makes Southern California so special. So when I see another example of our nature being portrayed as just brown arid hills, yeah, I think it's worth it to counter this portrayal because just look at what Southern California really is!
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