California Succulents: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

By Plant Community Monitoring Scientists in Parks Intern Lee Walker, San Francisco Bay Area Inventory & Monitoring Network

Dudleya farinosa, or bluff lettuce, is a native succulent found within our dune scrub plant community monitoring plots in Point Reyes National Seashore.

© Ryan Brooks / Photo 282590741 / 2023-05-22 / iNaturalist.org / CC BY-NC

With plump leaves that are commonly arranged in attractive, rosette-forming spirals, succulents are popular as houseplants. In the wild, they can be found all over the globe, especially in dry regions with rocky or sandy soils where their water retention skills give them an edge. Several species occur within the coastal dune scrub habitats that the San Francisco Bay Area Inventory & Monitoring Network’s Plant Community Monitoring (PCM) team surveyed this field season. A couple of species stood out, one being a beautiful native, and the other a prolific plant out of place.

The Good

Liveforevers (Dudleya spp.) are a genus of perennial succulents belonging to the stonecrop family, Crassulaceae. California is home to 26 native Dudleya species, with ten of them classified as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. As the stonecrop family name suggests, Dudleya are commonly found in rocky outcroppings or rocky/sandy soils. Dudleya farinosa, or bluff lettuce, is the species found within our dune scrub monitoring plots at Point Reyes National Seashore. Bluff lettuce is also common in Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It typically has a distinctive powdery blue color due to a waxy coating that provides the plants with UV protection. This transitions to a reddish hue near the leaf tips and flowers.

Bluff lettuce has a wide range across northern California coastal scrub habitats, and is not currently listed as threatened or endangered. Still, only two of our PCM dune monitoring plots at Point Reyes have small bluff lettuce populations. These small populations are in danger of being pushed out by a fast-growing succulent known as ice plant.

The Bad

Ice plant (Carpobrotus edulis), also known as sea fig, is a perennial, succulent, shrubby plant native to South Africa. It’s in the fig-marigold family, Aizoaceae. Californians first introduced this species to the coast in the 1900s as a means of soil stabilization and erosion prevention. That decision continues to have disastrous effects. Ice plant is mat-forming and can quickly spread both by seeds and colonially. Individual plants are capable of growing over three feet in diameter in a single year. During our monitoring season, eight out of our 12 dune plots had ice plant.

Left image
Plant Community Monitoring plot 06, transect B, on June 26, 2025. Ice plant is overwhelming basically the whole transect line.
Credit: NPS

Right image
Plant Community Monitoring plot 06, transect B, on June 30, 2016. The transect line crosses a diverse assortment of native plants. There's no ice plant in sight.
Credit: NPS

So why is this plant so bad if it is supposed to reduce erosion and can cover large swaths of land? Well, ice plant is not only invasive. It also alters the natural movement of sand in dune habitats, resulting in a changed environment and reduced species diversity. Several of our dune monitoring sites had large colonies with multiple layers of dead material from previous years that were so dense that nothing else could grow under it.

Ice plant also has specialized structures within the plant material that hold on to salt and release it into the soil when the plant dies. All that salt makes it so that surrounding native species, like bluff lettuce, cannot establish, resulting in a monoculture.

Removal isn’t easy either. Ice plant can flower year-round, and each fruit can contain hundreds of seeds that readily establish after removal or herbicide treatment of the original parent plant. Currently, Point Reyes National Seashore Association (PRNSA) and the National Park Service organize seasonal “Thursday Weeders” volunteer opportunities at Abbott’s Lagoon twice a month to remove ice plant and other problematic, out-of-place species such as European searocket (Cakile maritima) and European dune grass (Ammophila arenaria). This helps Point Reyes to stay on top of their spread.

The Ugly

Despite our team’s work to monitor habitat and the efforts of PRNSA and the park to remove problematic species like ice plant, a different threat to bluff lettuce lingers: illegal poaching. Very few Dudleya species can be propagated from leaf cuttings, so illegal harvesting often includes the removal of the entire plant. In some reported poaching attempts, poachers removed anywhere from 50 to over 800 plants from wild areas of Mendocino County, California.

In some reported poaching attempts, poachers removed anywhere from 50 to over 800 plants from wild areas of Mendocino County, California.  

California Department of Fish and Wildlife

Complete removal of many individual plants may severely reduce small, isolated populations of Dudleya and have impacts on surrounding wildlife that rely on these plants as a food or nectar source. Unfortunately for the poached bluff lettuce, removal isn’t the worst fate it will face. Most are shipped internationally to countries with unsuitable climates for the succulents. Many likely die within a year or less in their new homes.

Poaching has become such an issue that on September 28, 2021, California legislators passed AB 233, making it a misdemeanor to uproot, harvest, or cut Dudleya on state, federal, or private lands in California.

So, if you ever have the pleasure of seeing a species of Dudleya in the wild, take only photos and leave these beautiful plants untouched for others to enjoy!

For more information

• If you're interested in learning more about how the Plant Community Monitoring crew works and what we're learning, visit our website or contact Botanist Kelsey Songer.
• Learn more about problematic, out-of-place plants in Bay Area national parks.

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