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One day earlier this spring, botanist Nick Jensen visited one of the few “super blooms'' in California following a bone dry winter across the state. Under a bluebird sky, he hiked among displays of wildflowers that popped like confetti in sweeping hues of orange, purple, pink, and yellow. Native species like California poppy, lupine, and purple owl’s clover overtook the volcanic landscape known as North Table Mountain and spritzed their sweet perfume across the cool afternoon.
Jensen wasn’t alone—the rare spectacle had drawn thousands of people to the ecological reserve only an hour outside of Sacramento. In true super bloom fashion, visitors brought selfie sticks, sundresses, and wide brimmed hats, posing among the vast fields of color. Some crushed the very flowers they came to see.
Much of California this spring, however, remained parched and brown. Locations popular for their exceptional wildflower blooms like Anza Borrego Desert State Park—that drew crowds the size of Coachella in 2017 and 2019—produced small, modest wildflower displays. Other popular locations in Southern California like Death Valley National Park, Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, Carrizo Plain National Monument, and Walker Canyon were mostly devoid of wildflowers.
“Nothing is guaranteed on any given year,” says Jensen, the conservation program director of the California Native Plant Society. “For an exceptional year, you need a fair amount of rain that is spread out over a significant period of time from the late fall to early spring.” He notes that the phenomenon is multifactorial and that scientists still can’t exactly predict when large scale blooms will occur—adding to the mystique of the displays. While the magnificent blooms vary by region in California, they typically happen about once a decade. Native wildflowers provide critical habitat for pollinators, improve soil health, help prevent erosion, and promote healthy ecosystems.
A collection of California poppies, purple owl’s clover, blue dicks, lupine, and goldfields at North Table Mountain Ecological Reserve, outside of Oroville, California.
Due to social media and two nearly back to back super blooms in recent years, the term seeded itself in America’s cultural consciousness. Over 50 brands, from Urban Outfitters to Carolina Herrera, have sold products and fashion lines inspired by the blooms; music festivals, underwear collections, and one chronic illness app have also taken the name of the phenomenon. Countless influencers have posed and promoted products among the poppies. A 2020 study in Human Ecology showed that the ephemeral events are also socially, economically, and culturally significant to the desert communities they surround.
But despite their popularity and ecological importance, wildflower blooms across California and the greater Southwest are in peril due to a pile-on of human-caused stressors including invasive plants, residential and green development, agriculture, mining, and climate change. “We have lost a significant portion of wildflower habitat in such a short period of time,” Jensen says. “This phenomenon, which seems so rare and so special—because it is so rare and special—might not have been that uncommon in the past.”
A wildflower super bloom near Diamond Valley Lake in March 2019.
Visitors walk through poppy fields during a super bloom in Walker Canyon, March 2019.
Postcard from 1935.
A poppy field in Southern California, 1903.
Landscapes like Carrizo Plain National Monument, a large grassland near the southwest corner of California’s Great Central Valley, offer us a sliver of what the Central Valley once looked like before agriculture and development covered a majority of the valley. Naturalist John Muir once wrote about walking for days in extensive blooms that carpeted the region as he crossed the wide plains. Similarly, early Spanish sailors described California as “la tierra del fuego,” the land of fire, for it’s copious coastal poppy displays that blanketed the land.
Fiddlenecks coat a hillside on Tejon Ranch.
I meet Jensen on an April morning in the foothills of the Santa Ana mountains outside of San Juan Capistrano for a day of flower chasing across Southern California. We hike a ridge trail in Caspers Wilderness Park that offered extensive views of the mountains and valley below. Like much of California this spring, the landscape of Caspers was devoid of large blooms, though patches of invasive grass swayed in the wind.
“Many of these invasive plants in California are non-native grasses from the Mediterranean and Eurasia and have had the ability to outcompete many of our native plants,” Jensen says as we amble beside a large meadow of exotic grass. A few native mariposa lilies and paintbrushes sit on the outskirts of meadows, relegated to the edge by an invasive grass known as ripgut brome. In some places, the grasses take the place of native wildflowers which, on a wet year, could include vast collections of poppies and other bright annuals.
A 2019 study in Biological Invasions showed that ripgut brome suppresses native wildflowers due to its accumulation of plant litter—or thatch—that forms a thick mat, making it difficult for most native plants to push through. The brome’s lofty stalks also block sunlight from other native plants, resulting in the exclusion of many native species.
“Climate change will affect both native plants and exotic grasses, but this legacy of thatch will continue to be a persistent problem,” says Nicole Molinari, the study’s lead author and Southern California ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service. These grasses are largely responsible for turning many of the state's hillsides golden brown for a majority of the year.
As Jensen and I leave Caspers to explore nearby Crystal Cove State Park, I drive across Orange County and witness hillsides of more ripgut and other invasive mustards that grow taller than the hikers beside it. When in bloom, mustard covers hillsides in tiny yellow flowers as bright as highlighters. They are a beautiful super bloom in their own right but, like ripgut, their aggressive growth evicts entire swaths of habitat from native plants.
Native wildflowers provide critical habitat for pollinators, help prevent erosion, and promote healthy ecosystems.
Traveling by car across Southern California, it’s easy to observe the toll development takes on wildflower habitats across the region. As one of the most populous urban areas in the country—with over 24 million residents—the region’s sprawl is only briefly broken by preserves, parks, and wilderness that allow opportunities for native plants to grow. At Crystal Cove, a beachfront park sandwiched in between developments outside of Laguna Beach, invasive mustard dominates the landscape.
“We can’t afford to consider losing even a single additional acre of wildflower habitat,” says Jensen, mentioning numerous developments putting wildflower environments at risk across the state. One of these projects, Centennial, plans to construct a town of 19,000 units in a remote region in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County on a parcel of land that explodes in a kaleidoscopic super bloom, like a Monet painting on steroids. The project, led by Tejon Ranch Co., has been in development since 2002, but last month it was temporarily halted by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge after cases were filed—one by The California Native Plant Society and the Center for Biological Diversity, and a second by Climate Resolve.
The company claims the development is essential due to a housing crisis in Los Angeles County, but advocates opposing the project say it’s in a dangerous wildfire zone, will increase greenhouse gas emissions, and will erase one of the few remaining spaces of wildflower habitat in California. “Californians shouldn’t have to choose between irreplaceable habitats and affordable housing,” Jensen says.
The 2005 wildflower display on Tejon Ranch where the Centennial City development is proposed to take place.
Across the Mojave Desert, other projects threaten thousands of acres of habitat on public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. As a multi-use land agency, the BLM oversees mining and other resource extraction projects, as well as green energy projects like solar and wind farms. “Over my time as a botanist, I’ve witnessed the solar industrialization of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of acres in the desert,” says Naomi Fraga, director of conservation at California Botanic Garden. “Most people might not think about how industrial scale solar is impacting super blooms,” she says.
While environmental groups agree on the need for green energy, many argue that carbon-sequestering desert environments shouldn’t be used for large-scale solar farms or wind farms. Non-profit groups like Basin and Range Watch argue for integrating solar in urban centers, covering large swaths of already developed land like parking lots and warehouses. A recent study in Nature showed that if California covered all 4,000 miles of its canals with solar panels, they would save over 63 billion gallons of water from evaporation and produce 13 gigawatts of renewable power every year. Still, projects like the Yellow Pine Solar Project in Nevada plan to bulldoze over 3,000 acres of pristine desert habitat to install a large-scale solar farm, projected to destroy over 90,000 Mojave yuccas, as well as habitat for the endangered desert tortoise.
“People often think of deserts as these desolate landscapes that only come to life when there’s rain,” Fraga says. “But life is always present, it’s just in the form of seeds.” In the ground is the soil seed bank, she explains, the natural storage for dormant seeds in the ecosystem. The seeds wait patiently for perfect conditions, sometimes even decades, before sprouting. As climate change affects weather patterns, wildflowers face another element of uncertainty. “My concern is that delayed precipitation will have an impact on plants that require early, cold rains,” Fraga says. Even if seeds do germinate, she warns, they can also die off if temperatures rise too rapidly before plants can set seed into the soil.
Western Joshua trees—currently granted candidate status under the California Endangered Species Act—on Conglomerate Mesa.
Towering in the Mojave Desert between the Sierra Nevada and the mountains of Death Valley National Park is Conglomerate Mesa, a rugged ridge part of California’s remote Inyo Mountains. Near the transition zone of the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts, the flat-topped mountain holds a rich biodiversity of flora that desert botanist Maria Jesus has spent the past two years surveying. “In 2019, there was a whole sea of rock and sand that transformed into colorful blooms,” says Jesus. “There tends to be super bloom events in the lower elevations [of the mesa] but in the higher elevations you get more reliable, sparse blooms.”
On Conglomerate Mesa’s arid contours covering over 22,000 acres, the mountain holds the icon of the Mojave Desert, the threatened western Joshua tree—currently a candidate under the California Endangered Species Act—as well as rare species like the Inyo rockdaisy and Parry’s monkeyflower. Besides flora, numerous animals call the mesa home, from Nelson’s bighorn sheep to Townsend's Western Big-eared bat, which is listed as a sensitive species. To this day, the mesa remains a traditional pinyon pine nut harvesting sight for Indigenous tribes who live nearby, and is said to contain numerous Indigenous artifacts.
The Inyo rock daisy grows on a rugged terrain on Conglomerate Mesa. The rare flower has become a mascot for advocates hoping to save the mesa from mining.
A calico monkeyflower blossoms on the side of a rocky hillside. The species is listed as rare by the California Native Plant Society.
The mesa, which is located on BLM land, is currently being explored for an open pit cyanide heap leach mine—a hazardous mining practice that has been banned in states like Montana and Wisconsin, as well as numerous countries around the globe—by the company K2 Gold Corp. Alongside the mine, the company would construct five to seven miles of roads, as well as over one hundred drill sites. A coalition of environmental groups like Friends of the Inyo and local tribes like the Timbisha Shoshone and Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone oppose the mine and are seeking permanent protection of the mesa. Many worry the negative environmental impacts of the mine will turn away visitors from the Eastern Sierra, which relies heavily on outdoor tourism.
“My family has been here for thousands of years,” says Kathy Bancroft, the tribal historic preservation officer of the Lone Pine Paiute Tribe. “They’re going to take what they want and leave us with a big disaster. We’re the ones left here to clean up, we’re the ones that have always been here—and we’re not going anywhere.”
California’s wildflower blooms are left out of the seven natural wonders of the world, yet they hold their own against the Northern Lights, Victoria Falls, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But because they operate on their own timescale, spending years gathering their pacifist army of seeds and waiting for the perfect conditions to blossom, impatient humans seem to forget about them, seeing the landscapes they decorate as desolate. Perhaps we forget that in order for super blooms to happen, they need protected, conserved habitats so that when conditions are right, they’re given the best chance possible to remind millions of the wonder of nature.
“Even though there’s not a super bloom every year, there's always something to appreciate at a smaller scale,” says Naomi Fraga. “It helps us better understand the grandeur of these incredible, impressive displays as wildflowers—and reminds us that there's a lot happening underground.”
A super bloom of native flowers blanket a section of Conglomerate Mesa.
