Wildflowers : When the California Deserts Are in Bloom, a Particular Species of Nature Lover Faces Its Greatest Challenge

They swept down like excited killer bees, filling the quiet desert canyon with their peculiar buzz: Condalia lycioides! Lycium andersonii! Prunus fisiculata!

A retired dentist spotted a Barrel Cactus and scrambled up a rockpile. A construction worker belly-flopped into the sand to observe a Desert Star. And with each new sighting, others swarmed, firing questions, scrawling in notebooks, whipping out magnifying glasses.

“They hate the name, but these are serious wildflower phreaks,” explained Lu Haas, who was leading this motley band of about 50 California Native Plant Society members on a weekend field trip through Joshua Tree National Monument.

An Annual Trek

Each year about this time, cars and buses haul hundreds of thousands of people to Southern California’s Mojave and Colorado Deserts in search of spring wildflowers. Towns in and around Joshua Tree National Monument, Anza Borrego Desert State Park, Death Valley National Monument, and the California Poppy Reserve in the Antelope Valley get the same sort of economic boost from a good flower season that mountain communities get when there’s good snow.

“The difference between a good year (for wildflowers) and a mediocre year can mean a difference of 300,000 or 400,000 visitors,” said Mark Jorgensen of Anza Borrego.

Unfortunately, Jorgensen and other naturalists say that the lack of rain last November means this won’t be a particularly colorful spring in the California deserts. Folks seeking to saturate their senses with sweeping vistas of pumpkin-orange poppies or hillsides drenched in the deep blues of the Royal Desert Lupine may be disappointed by this year’s floral displays.

Other flower aficionados, however, take the relative scarcity of blossoms as another challenge in their ongoing botanical scavenger hunt. The spectacular stuff attracted them initially, but like hovering wasps, they were soon drawn deeper into the botany of the plants, they say. And even as their sophistication led them to forsake poetic common names for the scientific--”Devil’s Lantern” becoming Oenothera deltoides, “Crucifixion Thorn” becoming Holacantha Emoryi --their aesthetic appreciation intensified.

“Beginners look at a flower and see nothing but color. They don’t notice plants that aren’t garish. They don’t notice the incredible detail and structure of the flowers,” said Andy Sanders, a UC Riverside botanist who was giving hit-and-run wildflower lessons to the Plant Society people flitting back and forth in the dry Joshua Tree wash.

In fact, for many aficionados, the lure--both aesthetic and scientific--is in the seemingly contradictory wild, in wildflower--and disdain for the native plant’s civilized cousins is not uncommon.

“Plant breeders basically breed for one big splash of color,” said Sanders. Consequently, “they turn out freaks. To me, roses and most of the other things people grow in their yards aren’t interesting.”

“They’re so pampered!” said Linda Hardie-Scott, contorting herself beneath a tripod in an effort to get a photograph of the minute, delicate flowers of a Broom Rape Bankes that had burst through the sand in the middle of the wash. “But wildflowers are survivors. Nobody has watered them or fertilized them . . . They’re just so clever,” she said.

An amateur botanist, Hardie-Scott spends a lot of time teaching schoolchildren about plants and their environmental survival techniques. The kids are particularly intrigued by the the ways flowers “trick” bees and wasps into pollinating them, she said.

For example, Hardie-Scott spoke of the 35 Southern California species of the Penstemon genus. “When you look into the flower, it’s like you’re looking down the mouth of a whale. The stamens look like a rib cage.”

One of the stamens, strategically placed at the lip of the tubular flower, is “like a spring trigger,” she said. When the insect crawls into the flower it triggers the stamen, causing the plant to shake pollen on its back--assuring that the plant’s pollen is distributed.

“And the wasps never learn. They trip on the stamen every time, “ she said, as if concluding a parable. “Kids just love that story.”

Other desert plants have similarly “ingenious” survival strategies--and it’s not just children who are fascinated by them, as anyone can see from the flocks of people attending interpretive programs at various desert parks and reserves each weekend in spring.

Cacti, for instance, have shallow root systems but are very efficient at slurping up and storing what little moisture occurs, Sanders explained. And plants such as the Ocotillo shoot out leaves quickly after a rain, then drop them as soon as soil moisture declines to prevent the dry desert air from reclaiming their lifeblood.

The Most Popular

But the ones that attract the most attention from wildflower aficionados are the annuals, or ephemerals, which preserve their species with a sort of “live fast, die young” approach.

To withstand drought, many of these plants coat their seeds with a growth-inhibiting substance, botanists explain. To germinate, the seed’s coating must be dissolved with a minimum amount of rainwater at a specific time of year. Then, if the soil temperature is right, they’ll sprout and blossom, flowering for anywhere from a couple of weeks to two or three months before they produce a new batch of seeds and die.

Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch knew that his colleagues frown on personification. But in “The Desert Year,” he personified anyway: “Let us not say that this animal or even this plant has ‘become adapted’ to desert conditions. Let us say rather that they all have shown courage and ingenuity in making the best of the world as they found it.”

Now wildflower aficionados aren’t going to come right out and say it, but it seems clear that some begin to identify with the flowers they become so intent on identifying. In the broadest sense, a symbiotic relationship of sorts evolves.

For some people, chasing wildflowers offers a way to survive civilization: “After awhile, we find ourselves looking at the color of the leaves, the shape of the leaves, and suddenly we’re not thinking of anything else. Not work, not home, nothing but the flower,” said Jack Shuk of San Diego, as he and his wife Linda sat in their VW bus near Borrego Springs, eating lunch and browsing through a flora guide.

And to romantics, desert plants symbolize grace in the face of adversity.

‘Out of Nowhere’

As Marion Hall, a volunteer docent at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve puts it, “They come up out of nowhere, and all they get to survive with is what the Lord gives them.”

Many of the 25,000 or so people who visited the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve last spring met Hall, who does what she does “because I enjoy flowers and I enjoy people, and only good people come to look at flowers.”

Those who strolled with Hall along one of the dirt trails that wind through the rolling hills of the 1,760 acre high desert reserve learned about the local flowers and the reserves’ efforts to stake out some turf for the diminishing fields of poppies.

On a windy afternoon last week, the volunteer docent pointed out the delicate red and violet petals of a Filaree and observed that “the way the lizards are running, warm weather must be on the way.”

She also let slip that when she first moved to Lancaster from Cleveland 35 years ago--so that her husband could help develop the experimental X-15 jet--she used to cry a lot.

“Our house didn’t have a cooler and neither did our car. It was awfully dry, 115 degrees.” She hated the desert, she said.

But her feelings began to change about the time she noticed the huge fields of wildflowers that bloomed then, she said. For years, the family had picnics under flowering Joshua Trees and in the lupine and poppy fields. Gradually Hall sunk roots of her own.

But her husband died of cancer in 1979, she said as she stood on top of a windy knoll looking out to where swatches of Alkalai Gold Field flowers colored the foothills of the snow-dusted Tehachapis. Then three years ago her son, a Vietnam veteran, died following brain surgery.

‘People Make Up for It’

Living alone hasn’t been easy, Hall confessed. “But the flowers and the people make up for it,” she said, pulling her bright-orange docent’s jacket over a T-shirt adorned with poppies.

For the most part, the folks spouting botanical terms at Joshua Tree seemed inspired more by science than romanticism. Still, when someone spotted the first single stalk of Wild Canterbury Bells poking up in the wash, others huddled around.

Protected by high-tech nylon and Goretex jackets in the latest shades of blue and purple, they dropped to their knees in the sand and marveled at how, as a simple matter of survival, the plant had fired up a cluster of brilliant blue flowers from which five white stamens blasted like skyrockets and inch towards the cloudy sky.