The West's identity best seen in spring

There are days of sunshine in the offing, the cherry buds are ready to open and the apricot petals are already on the wind.

Welcome to March, and stop and smell the blossoms. Or at least see them.

You never know what you might learn.

That's what I thought during a moment at a conference Friday at Stanford. Ostensibly we were discussing, at the new Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, the notion of identity. Was there a Western identity and how did we describe it? Lane, the legendary head of Sunset Magazine, a ``magazine of western living'' had thought enough of the idea to donate $5 million to the center last week.

So there we were debating the impact of wide-open spaces, great natural resources questions, ethnicity, the many different people who populated the West -- indeed, what was West? Me, I started rambling about apricot blossoms burgeoning forth and the sight and smell of eucalyptus in the rain or orange poppies on an open hillside. If those things gladden your heart, perhaps there is something definitive in the way we Westerners identify ourselves.

Apricots and Virgil

``I know what you mean,'' said Kevin Starr, a University of Southern California professor and state librarian emeritus probably best known for chronicling California. It brought him back to his days at Mountain View High School, studying Virgil one spring and looking out of the window. The Latin word, apricus or ``sun-loving'' seemed particularly apt with the apricot trees just outside the school window blooming their pink-white blossoms, the promise of the ruddy orange fruit to come, fruit that would be canned, dried or plucked from the tree and eaten fresh, whole and succulent. It was the cycle of life, the bounty of life, as we knew it in this valley.

Sure, that apricot tree is long gone, and that window and the school are no longer there, replaced, in the relentless renewal that is Silicon Valley.

And even though I know that the eucalyptus is not indigenous -- like apricots, prunes and most of us here -- it's not hard to learn what is. Transplants like Kevin Bryant, a suburban Chicagoan who leads field hikes for the California Native Plant Society, knows it just takes some appreciation.

Or maybe we conferencegoers needed to hear from immigrants like Arvind Kumar -- an active plant society member -- hailing originally from the state of Bihar in India.

He began planting his San Jose yard with native plants four or five years ago, discovering the Evergreen district of San Jose had good soil and it was easy to grow things there. It took him 20 years to discover the native plants in this state, after migrating here from graduate school in Rochester, N.Y. He sometimes ponders, ``What is Californian?'' he said. Hollywood movies? Napa wine? Sonoma cheese?

``To me, a big part of California is its unique environment, its mountains and valleys and rivers and beaches,'' he said. ``There is nothing else like it in the world. So also its plants, shrubs, and trees.''

Adopting a home

He's learned the rhythms of the seasons, reveled in the way the landscape turns bright green and alive from the rain in the winter and brown and dormant in the summer.

He's become a convert to native plant cultivation, an enthusiastic supporter and booster, citing the 6,000 species native to California, and thinks they should be as well-known to Californians as Yosemite or Big Sur.

Why?

``There's a line in one of Chitra Divakaruni's books,'' Kumar said of the well-known Fremont author. ``That when you start learning the names of the plants where you live, then you can think of it as home.''

Bill Lane would probably understand. It's part of becoming a Westerner.

You never know what you might learn when you stop and see the blossoms. Happy spring.