Bay Area plotters, join us Friday May 1st for a reunion under the eucalyptus. We’ll be reviewing lessons learned, filling in with species that have done well and scheming what to do in the areas that have been cleared. VIP appearance by Yoni!
RSVP with Mountainwatch.
/upcomingevents/2026/5/1
Poster @grandfathergreen@ulap.ko@sanbrunomountainwatch
Last week, ULAP co-founder Yoni Carnice @grandfathergreen spoke to the students and faculty of the Department of Architecture at Foundation University in Dumaguete, Philippines about his personal practice and our collective. Thank you to the students for your generosity and such thoughtful questions and engagement around our work. And thank you to @charlylaoschmidt for the invitation. It was truly a pleasure!
Photos: Creative and Multimedia Department, Foundation University
Join us for a special holiday workday at the Test Plot!
Sunday 12/15 from 1-3 pm.
Come by to lend a hand, enjoy some tasty treats, sip a hot drink and connect with fellow volunteers.
Sign up at mountainwatch.org
By early afternoon the fog lifted for us. Anna, a neighbor to the plot, mentioned that June, July, August used to be foggy every day all day. Recently she has noticed more sunny dayz.
The leaf litter is pretty intense, it’s a kind of pervasive mulch. But many species continue to survive with no supplemental water. Pacific aster, Sneezeweed, Evening primrose, CA fuschia and Hairy gumplant are in bloom. The little plant in pic 8 is Fiber Optic Grass (Isolepsis cernua).
Thank you to our regular volunteers Anna, Myer, Victoria, Timothy and Kevin, and welcome to new volunteers Helen and Enya!
#eucalyptusunderstory #communityhabitatrestoration #canativeplants
@calparks@practicelandscape@sanbrunomountainwatch@ulap.ko@missionbluenursery
Hands in the soil, the land needs laborers….
Much love to a wonderful group of new and old faces, neighbors who have found the plot by walking by, our broader community of landscape designers, and friends of San Bruno Mtn.
Together we dig below the eucalyptus litter, gently extracting the corms of oxalis, planting new species to add to our scrub, oak, prairie and seep habitats. Thrilled to find a red elderberry that has rooted itself from unknown origin, soaproot coming back and watching the bee plant and phacelia (Scrophularia californica, Phacelia California) thrive in the moist semi shady environs.
A new experiment to watch: Yoni took cuttings from dogwood and willow and we buried them around the perimeter of the plot. Will they root? How many years before we can start coppicing? (Slide 9)
#californianativeplants
#communitystewardship
#landcare
#novelecosystems
#fog
#eucalyptus
Join us on Monday for a special MLK Day of Service at the San Bruno Mountain Test Plot. We will be tidying up and planting new species into the eucalyptus understory garden.
Link in bio to sign-up!
@test_plot@sanbrunomountainwatch
As the year winds down we wanted to feature holiday reflections shared by Filipino elders at our recent workshops.
For Filipino American immigrants, annual traditions are often centered in proximity to our Spanish and American colonial histories. Simbang Gabi or night mass is a series of nine daily masses leading up to Christmas often held before sunrise—a result of a “compromise” made by Spanish priests with farmers who headed to the fields at sunrise, in contrast to the traditional evening novenas. The tradition of Simbang Gabi has carried itself into Filipino Catholic Church communities in the Bay Area, providing spaces for community gathering and belonging.
Like many other Filipino migrants, my parents have fond childhood memories decorating their “Christmas tree” (with local trees like kalyos and calamansi) with white foam made from bar soap shavings to simulate the desired postcard American Christmas. The Americanized dishes we prepare like the hotdogs marshmallow skewers bespeak the sweet and salty sensibilities of Filipinos. Our traditions exist in liminal spaces between American and Filipino whereby the culture of our colonizers becomes approximated to a “white” Christmas.
At our wreath making workshop, we created our own San Bruno Mountain plants as a proxy for a lack of snowy holiday in the Bay Area. Just as our food and culture are an amalgamation of familial and colonial traditions, we feel this gives us freedom to explore contradictions and similarities in our ecological landscape. Mixing native Toyon with non-native eucalyptus as a symbol of unity and hope for the coming year reflects our approach to garden making.
In this holiday season, we embrace this message of hope and peace as we express our unwavering support for the people of Palestine and our demand for a ceasefire now!
Bay Area folks - please join us under the eucalyptus this Sunday on San Bruno Mtn where we’ll be hosting a small workday on plant survivorship of our 4 habitat types (seeps, scrub, oak woodland, grassland).
Sunday 12/10
2-4pm
Sign up in bio
Also check out the latest LOG POST by Victoria Bevington for an update on the San Bruno plot.
We are hosting a holiday wreath making workshop using plant material from San Bruno Mountain for Halo Halo Holidays, a Filipino Christmas crawl in SOMA Pilipinas at @balaykreative on Saturday December 9th. The workshop will be a tactile opportunity to learn about the unique flora of San Bruno Mountain.
Check out some of the beautiful wreaths participants at @kapwagardens made at last year’s workshop.
You can find more info under Events on our website.
See you there!
As we wrap up Filipino American History Month we continue to highlight the work of our collective.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Yoni Carnice is interested in how gardens and their maintainers inform landscape architectural practice. He received a Master in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Grounded in the Bay Area, his work explores the connections between the Filipino diaspora and local ecologies.
Hi design thesis, Vulgar: A Garden is an attempt to reconstruct the collective memory of Filipino migration to the San Francisco Bay Area. A series of gardens along a designed trail on San Bruno Mountain physically recount oral and visual histories through subtle gardening interventions that speak to the very idea of “commonness”. These “vulgar” punctuations at various scales reveal local climatological phenomena, native flora, and the symbolism embedded in the surrounding Filipino cultural landscape of Daly City, California.
Why are there so many Filipinos in Daly City?
For Filipino American History Month we’re diving into the history of Daly City’s thriving Filipino community.
