Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve, Protected ecological reserve in Santa Cruz Mountains, California.
Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve is a protected area in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. The land holds several distinct plant communities side by side, from ponderosa pine and redwood forest to chaparral and open grassland, each growing in its own section of the terrain.
The Nature Conservancy bought the land in 1989 and then passed it to the state of California. Four years later, in 1993, the Fish and Game Commission gave it the official status of an ecological reserve.
The Santa Cruz Sandhills at the heart of this reserve have a pale, sandy soil that looks almost out of place among the surrounding forest. Visitors walking through the open sections can clearly see how this unusual ground shapes what grows there and what does not.
The reserve is only reachable by car: take Bonny Doon Road East from Highway 1, then turn onto Martin Road and park near the fire station. Allow extra time to move between sections, as the different plant communities are spread across a wider area and walking between them takes a while.
The Zayante soils here are so unlike other soils in the region that they support plants found nowhere else nearby, including the Bonny Doon manzanita and the Ben Lomond spineflower. Both species depend on these exact ground conditions and cannot survive outside this small pocket of land.
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