Spring Flower Recipe
by Pat Flanagan
What makes for a great wild flower season? What are wild flowers anyway? Are we talking about the fields of annuals only or should we count the flowering shrubs, including the cactus, as well. Why don’t we have great years more often?
Our visitors respond that wild flowers are the blooming fields of annuals. But vibrant cactus flowers also count. And colorful shrubs like creosote, brittle bush, and ocotillo are really appreciated—best of all is when they come together. Then we are dazzled.
So what is needed? Water for sure, that is the essential ingredient, but not the only one. Timing is key, sometimes more important than the amount. Temperature counts. And then there are the seeds themselves, they have tricks.
It is a maxim that to get annual flower fields we need gentle soaking rains, hopefully once a month, starting in November and continuing through the winter. We also need the temperature to be neither too cold nor unseasonable warm. The best combination (whatever that is) encourages our native annuals to arrive before the non-native weedy mustards, thus getting the upper hand for the season.
Annual seeds make up approximately 50% of our plant diversity. That tells us that the ability to hang out (sometimes for years) until conditions are good is an excellent strategy. But experiments show that even hanging out has different meanings. Annual seeds have chemical coatings able to distinguish between a little and a lot of rain. Using a handful of annual flower seeds a researcher showed that after soaking the seeds in water, ½ germinated. Putting the ungerminated seeds to soak again, another half germinated, and so it continued. Annuals, like desert dandelions, brown-eyed primrose, lupines, and dune primrose, are the first to come up every year. With low soil moisture they can be short lived, flowering and producing seeds quickly. Or they can grow lushly taking weeks to complete their cycle. These are years when soil moisture is deep, the dune primrose grow thigh high and produce those fabulous bird cages and dandelions cover all the lowlands.
Just when you memorize the water formula, conditions throw a stunner. The 1994 winter had almost no rain, we were all depressed, until March when the heavens opened and didn’t close. Chemical coatings vanished producing the “March Miracle”.
Wild flower alerts tell you both what’s out there and where to go. Not only do flower species have individual timing schedules but because rain does not fall uniformly location is everything. Even in the worst of years there can be great local color.
The roots of shrubs are variable, growing both laterally and to different depths. This individuality means each species has its own, sometimes confusing, story to tell. Each story is further imbedded in a complex community story which demonstrates an efficient uses of resources. We see the proof of this but we are far from knowing all the rules.
Cactus, on the other hand, are famous for storing water and rarely a year goes by without blooms.
The flaming ocotillo tips remind us that pollination is the reason for all flowers. Ocotillo flowering tracks the northward migration of hummingbirds. Ocotillos sprout leaves whenever there is adequate rain, but they flower only once a year when the hummingbirds come through.
Conditions this year promises an exuberant flower season. We’re ready.
