![]() ![]() They’re not strong competitors,” she says, making it even more important to treat them with care when they do bloom, so they can survive and dump their seeds back into the soil to germinate again in the future. ![]() “I have a lot of respect for these plants, but in some ways they’re kind of wimpy. “That’s all making it harder on the native wildflowers,” says Fraga, while favoring introduced species such as Saharan mustard or oatgrass, which grow with impunity under the same conditions. And heat waves are now sweeping through in the winter, jumpstarting germination at the wrong time, or drying out delicate baby seedlings. Instead of smaller, recurring winter storms, precipitation is coming in record-breaking deluges, like the recent spate of atmospheric rivers that dumped a year’s worth of rain onto California in just a few weeks. West tends to receive more rainfall.īut climate change is reshaping some of those cues. Historical observations-cobbled together from botanists, European explorers, and later newspaper reports-suggest these conditions have historically lined up every decade or so, often following a drought but during an El Niño year, when the U.S. “The preparation for a superbloom isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon,” says Justen Whittall, a plant biologist at Santa Clara University. There are a few basic ingredients: a good rain year, but one where rains come consistently over several months and not in a single deluge cool nighttime temperatures and a well-stocked seed bank. Their occurrence is still shrouded in botanical alchemy. Why do superblooms happen-and what’s threatened? “The abundance is always there,” says Evan Meyer, director of the native plant-focused Theodore Payne Foundation, and “each superbloom is seeding the future.” Today, seas of flowers emerge almost exclusively in state or national parks-and especially desert regions including Death Valley, Anza-Borrego, Joshua Tree, and the arid Carrizo Plain, where flowers’ emergence contrasts spectacularly with the subdued dry-phase landscapes.Įven in the driest drought, deserts aren’t wastelands, but a flower miracle waiting to happen, says Daniel Winkler, a USGS desert expert: The seeds that feed the blooms are always present in the soil by the billions, just waiting-sometimes for decades-for the right conditions. had these extraordinary opportunities to enjoy nature in their city the way it had been.” “It’s one of the tragedies of the superbloom,” says Naomi Fraga, a botanist at the California Botanic Garden. In 1895, one giddy visitor told the Los Angeles Times “it is as if the brightest sunset clouds had dropped down and wrapped the hills in its mantle.” In 1929, a National Geographic writer gushed that “in the early spring, California dons her party dress… literally all outdoors become one vast garden of flowers, until it seems there is no end to the colorful panorama.”īut as development pushed farther out, and more landscapes were converted to agriculture, grazing, subdivisions, or as invasive plants outcompeted the slightly fussy native seedlings, many of California’s spring flower fields disappeared. After a good winter, the San Pasqual hills near Pasadena would glow with poppies: Angelenos hopped on trolleys en masse to the see the flowers. John Muir described the Central Valley as an “inland sea” lined with blue flowers.Įven through the early 20th century, blooms persisted even in heavily populated Los Angeles County. After tribal communities collected the abundant edible seeds, they often burned fields intentionally-a strategy that likely encouraged consistent flower regrowth. Early Spanish colonizers described years when late winter-blooming native wildflowers stretched along coastal prairies and up narrow canyons, from what’s now the southernmost tip of California all the way up to the Bay Area, through the Central Valley and Sierra foothills, and beyond. In the distant past, these blooms were often excellent-and enormous. Springtime annual wildflower blooms have happened for at least tens of thousands of years, driven in large part by fickle winter rains that would in some years bathe the California landscape from about December through February. ![]()
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