California was once carpeted in wildflower pastures that have been destroyed by introduced plants, says a UC Riverside ecologist in a new book.

“We need to recognize that California was not at all grasslands in the past,” said Richard Minnich, the author of California’s Fading Wildflowers, published this month by the University of California Press. “In the late eighteenth century, land all the way from San Francisco to San Diego was carpeted by wildflower pastures. Today these pastures have vanished, with brome grass taking their place.”

Minnich drew evidence about 18th-century California from the records of Franciscan missionaries and Spanish soldiers. The arrival of large numbers of Gold Rush immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century brought invasive plants and grasses deep into the state and essentially overran the native pastures.

“This book is an incredibly rich synthesis of history, plant geography, and landscape ecology, which its author uses to describe a place — coastal and interior California — that experienced in the past 200 years one of the most complete human-caused landscape transformations in the world,” said Michael Barbour, a professor emeritus of plant sciences at UC Davis.

Full press release from UCR here. Minnich’s book is available here.