Dudleya Farinosa, Coastal Superstar

Our coastal bluffs come alive with showstopping wildflowers every spring, but there’s one humble succulent that deserves your admiration and protection. Native to the California coast, the beautiful red-tipped Dudleya farinosa dot the coastal landscape and have become something of a celebrity for all the wrong reasons: they’re being stolen in droves.

Why? In part, succulents are having a moment. Living succulent walls are a thing in case you haven’t noticed. On a recent trip to Venice Beach I noticed every other business boasted a gorgeous vertical wall of succulents—some inside right alongside designer shoes, some fronting bar and restaurants, others doubling as storefronts attempting to beautify the concrete jungle.

But the storefronts aren’t the market for the Dudleya, which can be grown easily from seed and are available in nurseries. No, the Chinese seem to highly value them for their color, symmetry, and age (some are over 100 years old). They sell for $40-80 a piece; demand is so high that thieves steal onto the bluffs and strip hundreds off at a time. The kicker: the climate in China is too hot for these lovely plants to survive, so most die off after a few weeks.

Poaching. A word I wish still just meant a way to gently cook eggs. But sadly, poaching, as in stealing items of value from public lands in order to resell them, is something we are all too familiar with on the coast. We live amidst abundant natural resources, and over the years have had to contend with burl poaching (removing the scar tissue from redwood trees because the grain is beautiful) to abalone poaching (taking abalone that are not mature or catching more than your allotment, or using illegal means) to now succulent poaching.

The Department of Fish and Wildlife have their hands full, and limited resources often require volunteers to police our protected species, or in the case of the Dudleya, suspicious locals. Check out this Press Democrat article for more detail about a bust initiated by observant patrons of the Mendocino post office. In a nutshell, as we locals know, a long line forms if you’ve got more than a package or two to mail. The person at the counter was mailing THIRTY boxes to China, many with dirt on the bottom, which raised alarm bells in one of the waiting customers. Complaints were lodged, fast forward to a bust which resulted in thousands of dollars in fines and jail time. I relished the part of the story where the culprits, caught red-handed, were forced to replant 850 plants under the watchful eye of the game warden.

I learned about this phenomenon from my daughter’s boyfriend who covered the story on their high school radio show last year. I had never heard of them, or this issue until then. I sought a Dudleya out not long after and took the picture you see above. Beautiful! If you have a chance to admire one, do so. If you have an opportunity to replant one as part of a conservation effort, do that too! And by all means report any suspicious activity to Department of Fish and Wildlife.