Rain’s Golden Payoff : Poppies: Spring is expected to bring an abundance of wildflowers in the Antelope Valley. Tours are available at the reserve outside Lancaster.

It’s been a little difficult to enjoy the recent rains when every glorious shower is followed by stern news reports that warn, “Don’t even think about the drought being over.”

But there is one spot in Los Angeles County where there could soon be visible proof that the drought is abating, if only temporarily. For the first time in three years, California poppies are expected to burst back into profusion in the Antelope Valley.

“I’d say on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best poppy season we would have, we could be getting a 6 or a 7 this year,” said James Geary, a district superintendent for the state Department of Parks and Recreation, who has been observing the famed California poppy display in the Antelope Valley for a decade.

A bountiful year would mean a renaissance of other wildflowers common to the area, including filaree, alkali gold fields, fiddlenecks and lupines, Geary said.

In March when he made his prediction, there was little evidence that spring--the season that brings spectacular poppy displays in good years--was on its way.

As Geary stood in the middle of the state-owned Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve just west of Lancaster, the temperature was in the low 50s, the wind was howling, the sky was the color of doomsday and rain and hail were pelting him. But at his feet, like a brave little soldier determined to survive an onslaught from above, was a lone golden poppy.

The moisture from recent storms that hit the area gave Geary hope that the drought’s stranglehold on the poppies might be broken.

In 1985 and 1986, the most recent good years, the reserve had as many as 100,000 visitors who came to see the fields of the golden poppies, the official state flower.

It was named for Russian surgeon Johann Friederich Eschscholtz, who was part of the expedition that visited California in 1816. One of his shipmates was Adelbert von Chamisso, who gave the California poppy its scientific name, Eschscholtzia california . Before that, Spanish visitors to the area called the flower dormidea, meaning “the drowsy one,” because its petals folded up in the evening as if it were sleeping.

The flower has a long history in the West, figuring in American Indian legends that told of the Great Spirit sending a flower the color of fire to the Earth to drive away the cold and frost of winter.

In 1903 the Legislature named the poppy the official state flower because its color symbolized California’s two big attractions--gold and sunshine. The Legislature also named April 6, which this year falls on Saturday, as California Poppy Day.

Gold and sunshine brought great waves of people to the state, ironically endangering the wildflowers. Over the years, field after field blanketed with the flowers has been taken over for development or agriculture. In 1970, the state released a study showing that there were only five areas in California that still had regular annual bloomings of wildflowers.

The reserve near Lancaster is one of those areas. Shortly after the study appeared, Jane Pinheiro, an Antelope Valley resident then in her 60s, began organizing volunteers to help preserve the area. Calling themselves the Wildflower Preservation Committee, the volunteers began raising money to buy a specific area of farmland.

“They had all kinds of programs for fund-raising,” said Beverly Roths, current president of the Poppy Reserve Interpretive Assn., an organization of docents that now gives tours of the area. “One of the things they did was put little cans in schools all up and down the state, urging the students to collect ‘pennies for poppies.’ ”

Local businesses pitched in and state and federal agencies promised matching funds. “Jane Pinheiro was in Sacramento a lot, getting the state involved,” Roths said. Committee records show that in the course of about 10 years of collecting, it raised $70,000.

In addition, several of the landowners were convinced to either donate a portion of their holdings or sell at below-market prices.

By 1976 almost 1,800 acres had been obtained and the state officially named the area a reserve for the flowers. The California State Park Foundation, a private, nonprofit group, agreed to help raise $410,000 to build a visitors center.

The center, which is heated in the winter by a passive solar system and powered mostly by a windmill, was dedicated in 1982 and named for Pinheiro, who died in 1978. On the walls inside the cinder-block center hang 25 drawings of wildflowers by Pinheiro, who was an amateur artist.

Also at the center are posters and a video that show spectacular displays of the wildflowers that carpeted the preserve in the mid-1980s. During the last couple of years, with the drought’s grip on the area strengthening, those pictures were just about the only evidence that this was a wildflower preserve.

The poppies that did bloom in those years did not provide much of a show. “When everything around them is brown, they just don’t stand out,” Geary said. “It’s when they have a green background that they are really spectacular.”

This year, the grass is already green at the preserve.

“We’ve learned that we can’t always make good predictions,” Geary said. “Some years you get fooled. But if we keep getting the rain, I think we have a good chance to have the season come in some time the first or second week of April.”

Continuing cold weather this spring could delay the blooms for several weeks. Once the season begins, the flowers will last from a week to a month, again depending on the weather.

The center is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily until the season ends. During the peak blooming period, walking tours are given on weekends by Department of Parks and Recreation personnel. The center also offers maps for self-guided walks on loop trails in the reserve.

Geary and Roths warn that it’s illegal to pick poppies--violators can be fined up to $500. There are ecological reasons not to pick the wildflowers, too.

“For every one that gets picked, we lose those seeds and that can mean 100 less flowers the next year,” Geary said.

There is also a practical reason to leave the flowers be. “Every year we do get some people who pick them,” Roths said. “But what they don’t realize is that the poppies do not do well at all out of the ground. They were probably completely wilted by the time they got home.”

The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve , located about 15 miles west of downtown Lancaster near the corner of 150th Street West and Lancaster Road, is open during the poppy season from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily . Parking fee is $5 per car. For information on the reserve and the current state of the poppy season, call (805) 724-1180. For general information on the local season, there is a Wildflower Hotline number, (818) 768-3533, maintained by the Theodore Payne Foundation.