Where Are the Wildflowers? March, 1st
Last week, Sendy and I went for a hike on the Art Smith Trail, and it was hard to ignore the dry conditions on the trail. I was only able to find a single notch-leaf phacelia sprouting from the desert soil, and it’s easy to see why. We really got no monsoon rains last year, not much fall rain, and only a little late winter rain in most of the desert. Fields of poppies, sunflowers, and brown-eyed primrose - the things that we've seen over the last couple of years of “superblooms” in the desert, are almost certainly not going to materialize.
That doesn't mean there aren't flowers blooming all over the desert right now - it just takes a little bit more searching to find them. This week we hiked the Mission Creek Trail in the Sand to Snow National Monument, and the wildflowers there are actually pretty good!
Bladderpod, Peritoma arborea, has been one of the literal bright spots of the wildflower season so far, blooming all over the north side of the Coachella Valley, from Sand to Snow National Monument, through the Little San Bernardino Mountains, all the way to Joshua Tree National Park.
Bladderpod, Peritoma arborea
We also saw lots of wild cucumber, Marah macrocarpa, blooming on the trail, which has a really nice distinctive flower with a sweet aroma that permeated the air around us. The fruits are even more distinctive - orange-sized spiky green fruits hanging from the trees where the cucumber vines were draped.
Wild Cucumber, Marah macrocarpa
In Mission Creek and the nearby Whitewater Preserve, snowmelt from the San Gorgonio Mountains is helping to nurture a greater variety of wildflowers than anywhere else I’ve seen in the desert so far this year. We also saw wild heliotrope, Fremont pincushion, pale sun cups, bristly fiddleneck, brittlebush, narrowleaf goldenbush, and my personal favorite of the bunch, white fiesta flower.
Download the full wildflower list →
Even better, many of these annual wildflowers are just getting started. You can come this week and see them blooming, come next week they'll still be blooming, and will keep developing over the next few weeks. Fingers crossed, you'll be able to see some of the plants that have not yet started to bloom, like beavertail cactus. We saw several beavertail cacti covered in buds, that in a week or two are going to be transformed into spectacular purple wildflowers!
Beavertail Cactus, Opuntia basilaris
Remember, all of these flowers will make great observations for the 2021 Wild Coachella Challenge from UCR Palm Desert, which starts this week and runs throughout the month of March. Just add your observations to iNaturalist to participate.
Stay tuned for more wildflower sightings, coming up next week!
- Colin