Rancho Venado is a 2500-acre ranch located at the eastern edge of the Inner Coast Ranges in Colusa County. In 1874, August Shuckman acquired Mountain House, a stage stop at the community of Venado. Today, his great-grandson, Jerry Brown (former Governor of California) and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, live on the ranch. One of Browns’ goals for the ranch is to make it a place for scientific inquiry. The Flora of Rancho Venado is one of several such projects at the ranch.

Since 2022, Jack Alderson, retired NRCS Agricultural Engineer for the Colusa County region, known for his Bear Valley Wildflower Report (https://www.colusarcd.org/colusa-county-wildflowers) has been developing a flora of Rancho Venado. To date he has documented 355 taxa. The resulting plant list can be found here [link to plant list page]. His specimen collection includes 242 native California species and three plants listed in the CNPS Inventory of Rare Plants. The ranch has had a long history of cattle grazing typical of most of the land along the western edge of the Sacramento Valley and it remains a working cattle ranch today. Creating a flora of this land interested Jack because it has had limited botanical exploration compared to the more favored locations like Bear Valley and Walker Ridge to the west.

The Herbarium has provided guidance and technical support to Jack on this project in the form of data entry, processing and imaging of his specimens, now housed here and available to view on www.cch2.org.