Old Plants in a New Home

By Jamie Liu and Kayla Patel

Our favorite corner of UCLA is looking better each week as we continue to form Sage Hill’s restoration plan. After submitting the TGIF application for funds last Friday, we are optimistic that there will soon be a sign marking Sage Hill as a natural area at UCLA. As we wait for the funding and sign to be ready, Team Biodiversity moved forward with the plants at the nursery. We took an inventory of the nursery by counting the number of native individuals that were thriving. Hopefully, they will continue to survive when we soon remove them from the safety of their pots to plant them across the varied landscape of Sage Hill. Also in the nursery, we planted some milkweed seeds because we are hoping the conditions this week will be perfect for them.

In our spare time, we continue to weed all over the hill so to give native plants a better chance at surviving. Weeding is hopefully going to help our transplants survive. Transplanting has been our main focus as we moved dozens of loose Encilia californica plants to pots and we will be able to check on them next week to see how they’re doing. We also transplanted some plants from the nursery directly onto Sage Hill: two yucca plants, and one Encilia california that was starting to outgrow its potted home. We’ll be able to enter these new plants into iNaturalist to mark them as official residents of Sage Hill.