By Stephen McCabe
One of my great moments as a concert attendee was to be able to get up close to watch Jimi Hendrix at the Northern California Folk Rock Festival in 1969 when I was 15.
Sure, I saw the Rolling Stones, the Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, B.B. King, the Beach Boys (a little past their prime), the Jefferson Airplane in their prime, Janis Joplin from far back in a crowd, and the Grateful Dead, but Hendrix was special.
During the long day of music at the Festival the crowd spread out and my friend Howard Hopkirk creatively worked us between people almost up to the stage. I only had a standard lens and six images left on the roll, but I got shots of Hendrix playing with his teeth and dramatically finishing a song.
Decades later, my colleague Mark Dodero was exploring Colonet, in Baja California, Mexico. This peninsula is famous among botanists of the region as a hot spot of diversity, with many plants found only in this small area. Mark was listening to “Voodoo Child” by Jimi when he stumbled upon a new species of liveforever (genus Dudleya), heretofore unknown to science. Mark wrote his thesis on dudleyas and had already named another new species, but years later hadn’t named this one on Colonet Mesa.
After working in Yosemite I studied dudleyas, which are succulent plants, on my way to a Master’s degree in 1985. Mark asked for some plants later, so I shared some with him as he worked on his Master’s degree. At a conference I saw a talk by Mark and photos by Alan Harper (president of the board of Terra Peninsular) of an unnamed species from Colonet Mesa.
Years later, the species had not yet been named, so I joined an expedition to Baja California to try to see the undescribed species. On a several day trip, Alan and I managed to break off from the group to look for the species. Alan led me right to the population. Within an hour, I had collected data about the plants and how they differed from other dudleyas.
Returning home, I contacted Mark and asked when he was going to name the species. He was extremely busy at the time, so we decided to join forces and enlisted Mike Simpson of San Diego State as a collaborator. Mark said I could work on the species as long as we named it after Jimi Hendrix. With my past association with and fondness for the music, we agreed on the name.
On December 15, 2016, we announced the name of the new succulent, Dudleya hendrixii, and releasing to the public for the first time one of the Hendrix photos I made back in the sixties, in hopes that this paired announcement of the photo and a new plant species will generate interest in preserving this species and rare habitats in Baja California.
If people are interested in making a donation to Terra Peninsular, the easiest is through International Community Foundation. This is fully deductible to US taxpayers.
For donations for Dudleya research, please write at swmccabe@gmail.com or smccabe@ucsc.edu
ABOUT STEPHEN MCCABE
Stephen McCabe is Emeritus Director of Research of the Arboretum at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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