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2003: A Season of California Wildflowers - Lake Isabella, Anza-Borrego, Antelope Valley

© Gregg Pasterick

While my wife and I were settling in in southern California, winter was dropping just the right amount of moisture on places that would respond with explosions of rainbows. By March we were finding these floral explosions near and far; from up in the Santa Monica Mts. to Ojai and Pismo Beach and back down through Carizzo Plain, to the southern Sierra Nevadas and western Mojave Desert, in Short Canyon and Red Rock Canyon. It was all new stuff in a rainbow of colors, and it was still picking up momentum.

Everywhere we went, Goldfields, Fiddelnecks and varieties of phacelia and lupine blanketed roadsides and hillsides and acres and acres of open fields. Our first return trip to Kernville, where we had spent the last few months of 2002, took us past the infamous Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve, which was already a sea of bright orange and only beginning to strut its stuff. And where the orange poppies weren't growing, Goldfields were, or blue, blue lupine.

In areas around Lake Isabella, just below Kernville, fields of sweet-smelling Popcorn flowers, Baby Blue-eyes and Cream Cups spread out like a Disney fairyland. Nearer Kernville sunshiny fields of Goldfields were dressed up with patches of raspberry-colored Owl's Clover. And like the poppy preserve, things were just getting started.

After that first trip back to Kernville, we made for the Anza-Borrego desert, in southern California. While it evidently was not a peak year for blooms in that arid place, it was still a treat for us. We saw blooming cacti galore, including Buckhorn Cholla, Desert Barrel Cactus, Engelmann Hedgehog (really), Fishhook Cactus and Beavertail. And then there were the tall, lanky, tentacle-like Ocotillo, with their scarlet red blossoms. It all was, in the vernacular of my youth, a real groove.

Meanwhile, Antelope Valley and nearby Gorman Post Road were disappearing under the ever-deepening tide of orange poppies and blues and purples of gilias and phacelias and lupines and bright yellows of Bigelow's Coreopsis and Goldfields ... It was like a plague of pigments, brought on by a vengeful god with a flare for fashion.

I can't begin to tell you how moving the sight of all this was. At one point, it brought tears to my eyes. Really.

Eventually there would be monkeyflowers and penstemmons and Matija Poppies and still more species of lupine and paintbrushes and landscapes drenched in spilt hues. There would be Our Lord's Candles and Desert Candles and Wooly Blue Curls and so many kinds of Mariposa Lilies ... haven't I mentioned the Mariposa Lilies? I will ...

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