What is chaparral?

Doc Searls was talking about various fire related thoughts and hit upon this:

As was pointed out to me not long after I arrived in California in 1985, the redwood— our state tree — is adapted to fire, as are many other forms of vegetation around here.

We have some fast growing, nearly impossible to kill vegetation growing on our hillsides. The second link above says that it's chaparral. I knew that, but what does chaparral really mean?

From the perspective of a curious observer, chaparral seems to be a combination of hard to kill, wildly alive plants and bushes.

Spring in this part of California is stunning. The hillsides are covered in bursting colors — plants and bushes rapidly overcome unused trails. For all the color, most of these plants are far from delicate; they have a variety of nasty defense mechanisms. As summer passes and fall ensues, much of the vegetation appears to die (some of it may, others simply become dormant). It also becomes kindling for a burning cycle which begins anew the seeding process. Yearly floods pose another hurdle which checks the introduction of new varieties (adapt fast or die... with no deep roots to cling to, the flooding and topsoil shift will kill it off). Within a couple years after a fire, a whole new ecology is roaring with life and few traces of the last burn are visible.

Trees seem to take a little while longer to create. They pop up on long untouched portions of our landscape, and eventually weed out much of the unruly wild vegetation because they have much deeper roots (which take a long time to create) and can suckle under all but the most adverse conditions.

We (people are still relatively new to the area really) also influence these growth patterns. We seem to be setting a lot of the fires but we also work really hard to stop them from their normal progress. While there are no more super fires, the time between burns is much shorter and their size is mostly smaller.

Quantity versus quality? Will it make a difference?

Update:

We get some answers.