Fickle Flowers

The hills are alive with . . . dead grass. Tourists heading for the Antelope Valley to see the usual profusion of springtime blooms at the California Poppy Reserve are going home disappointed because a comparatively warm, dry winter has produced a disappointingly drab poppy show.

In good years, the hills of the reserve 15 miles west of Lancaster look like huge swells on an orange ocean, thick with fields of poppies like the ones Judy Garland dashed through on her way to the Emerald City in “The Wizard of Oz.”

This year the hills are windblown and dry, dotted with only sparse patches of California poppies, the state’s official flower since 1903.

“It’s a little disappointing, really,” said Joe Sigona, who traveled more than three hours from La Mesa to see the 1,740-acre poppy reserve. “We saw a documentary on the public broadcasting station about these fields recently, and they looked like they were covered in orange carpet . . . not now.”

Others among the more than 100 visitors to the reserve Wednesday also were miffed by the missing flowers, which usually bloom between mid-March and May.

“You’re going to charge me $5 for that?” a visitor asked a reserve volunteer, pointing to the flower-bereft hills.

Most of the visitors said that the trip was worth it anyway, as they gazed at the thin orange veins of poppies mixed with a dab of indigo blue from the lupine, another wildflower.

“There are enough flowers here to imagine what a good year looks like,” said Bob Ulrich, who drove with his wife, Nancy, from Whittier to see the fields.

“We found out about this place on the Internet and decided to try it out. It’s beautiful here without the flowers, and we’ll come back again in a good year.”

But good blooms come about once every six years, according to Mary Lou MacKenzie, the park’s flower specialist.

California poppies are delicate, capricious flowers. A regular shrinking violet, you could say. If weather conditions aren’t just so, the flowers will pull a no-show.

MacKenzie said that for the flowers to be coaxed out en masse, they need cold winters to kill off the nonnative wild grasses that compete with the poppies for space on the hillsides.

Poppies also need plenty of rain, and although they bloomed almost a month early this year, not nearly enough rain has fallen to produce a great bloom, MacKenzie said.

For the flowers to make a comeback before May--the last month poppies will bloom--they would need another five inches of rain, she said.

The last “truly spectacular year” was in 1991, she said. 1995 was almost as good, mostly because of the 21 inches of rain that doused the area that year, MacKenzie said. But last year, with only two inches of rain, was a disaster.

“It was not very showy,” said MacKenzie, noting there was hardly a flower to be seen last year. “People were very disappointed.”

Even in years of good bloom, the flowers’ fickleness is a problem because if it is overcast or the wind is blowing, the poppies will close their oily petals like a fist.

So reserve employees pamper and protect them as much as they can. Anyone caught picking a California poppy at the reserve can be fined as much as $500. To increase the poppies’ numbers at the reserve, rangers conducted controlled burns to rid the area of the competing grasses. The fire does not harm the poppies, which evolved in an ecology in which wildfires are common.

Authorities burned 32 acres in 1995 in an effort to snuff out the grass and make room for the poppies. Mother Nature helped last August, when lightning ignited another fire that burned a sizable swath of land at the reserve, but neither fire seemed to help this year’s bloom, MacKenzie said.

“I always tell people not to come expecting too much,” she said. “That way they will be happy with what we have.”

For an update on the blooms before making the trip, flower enthusiasts can call the reserve’s 24-hour hotline: (805) 724-1180.