Wildflower expert Naomi Fraga was excited by the prospect of a bumper bloom this spring, after a winter of near-record rainfall, but this week's unseasonably warm and dry weather has dimmed her hopes for a year of magnificent bloom.
“Super blooms are not guaranteed every year, even after a lot of rain,” said Fraga, director of conservation programs at the California Botanical Garden in Claremont. “When it happens, it's extraordinary, but all the stars need to align, with rainfall, temperature and timing. We've had some of those ingredients, but it remains to be seen if the weather will cooperate to give us a spectacular bloom year.”
California has certainly had rain: It's been the second wettest season through January that LA has seen in 21 years, according to the Los Angeles Almanac. And the rainy weather came at the right time to give Southern California plenty of colorful blooms this spring, traditionally between mid-March and April in Southern California, Fraga said.
But wildflowers also need at least six weeks of cool weather to grow after germinating. Despite the rain, Southern California had record warm temperatures in November and December, Fraga said, “and apparently we're headed in that direction in January.”
Fields of wildflowers paint the hills yellow, orange and purple along Highway 58 and Seven Mile Road near Carrizo Plain National Monument on April 1, 2023.
(Laura Dickinson / San Luis Obsipo Tribune)
A surge of warm weather, like what Southern California is experiencing this week, can damage young plants, either forcing them into lackluster early blooming “that quickly fades away or drying out emerging buds that won't come to fruition,” Fraga said.
The average January high temperature in downtown Los Angeles is 68 degrees, but Wednesday's high was 83 degrees, said Rose Schoenfeld, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is not expected to hit record highs this week, but it will get close. Wednesday's high temperature was just a few degrees shy of downtown Los Angeles' record of 88 degrees on Jan. 14, which occurred in 1975, Schoenfeld said.
The best hope for a possible superbloom is for Southern California to have cool, wet weather next week, Fraga said, but the chances of that happening are doubtful. Temperatures are expected to drop a bit, said National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Wofford, “but they will still be about 5 degrees above normal next week.”
Right now, Southern California may see a small amount of rain between Jan. 22 and 24, Wofford said, but it won't be a huge amount, “maybe a quarter of an inch.”
However, Fraga said she is still excited to see what kind of bloom Southern California will have this spring, especially after last year's massive fires in the area.
A Plummer's butterfly lily blooming in Los Angeles.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Southern California may not have a super bloom this year, he said, but we have a good chance of seeing spectacular “fire followers” — native flowers that typically emerge after a wildfire, such as native snapdragons, dense stands of lupins, rustling bells and one of the most anticipated, the deep pink, lavender, white and yellow Plummer's butterfly lily, a species endemic to Southern California. (On Instagram, San Francisco Bay Area-based naturalist Damon Tighe posted some stunning photos of the flowers he took in 2022.)
The region has already seen some early wildflower displays at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, likely sparked by last fall's rain.
Fraga said he hasn't given up hope of seeing spectacular displays in Los Angeles this spring.
She has vivid memories of what she considers the region's peak blooming years of the past 20 years: in 2005, her first as a young botanist, 2016 and 2023, when our hills and fields were covered in colorful displays of California poppies, lupines, phacelia, burning stars and other native annuals.
“Obviously, the visual displays are incredible,” he said, “but some of the memories that stick with me the most are the smells, the smells that you don't get in a more average year. One year I came across a population of lace phacelia in Red Rock Canyon State Park. You see these flowers growing in patches here and there, but this time, I found this huge mass. And this smell permeated the air. I couldn't help but wonder what it was until I realized that they were the plants that gave off this perfume. And there were so many of them. pollinators attracted by its smell.”
Sometimes, she said, the smells from these massive clumps have been overwhelming, like when she and her plant-enthusiast husband stumbled upon a huge spread of a rather humble white annual known as linanthus jonesii, which closes its flowers during the day and opens them at dusk to attract moths.
They had been outside all day and were getting ready to leave, “when this smell hit the air. I said to my husband, 'I smell noodle soup,' and then I looked at the ground and saw that all these flowers were opening. The smell had a very umami smell. [vibe]like ramen, but then it got to be too much. And we started running towards our car, because the smell was just nauseating.”
The Theodore Payne Foundation Wildflower Hotline is a good way to keep track of where flowers are blooming, but it won't go live until March 1. In the meantime, wildflower lovers should keep their fingers crossed for cooler weather.
Fraga said he is still hopeful about what will happen this spring. “More humidity and cooling would help a lot,” she said, “but you never know when these super blooms will happen. It could still happen this year because we had a lot of rain. So no matter what happens, I'm excited for spring, because it's a great time to enjoy the outdoors and see an amazing display of nature.”
