The wild flowers of Mr. Muir

Sunset, March, 1998 by Jeff Phillips

Standing knee-deep in a shimmering lake of bright orange poppies is naturally distracting. The sun is high and warm, and the air is filled with the faint perfume of blue lupine and purple owl's clover pushing up among the poppies. A fat black-and-yellow bee bumbles by; a meadowlark calls to an empty blue sky.

How, I wonder, did John Muir manage to keep his attention focused on his naturalist note-taking in this flowery landscape that so dazzles the eye and disarms the senses? After all, my patch of wildflowers stretches only about a quarter-mile from the gravel road where I left my car to a green skirt of oak-studded hills to the east. Muir's first exposure to California wildflowers was the grand expanse of the Central Valley.

"When I walked, more than a hundred flowers touched my feet, at every step closing above them, as if wading in water," wrote Muir of a spring visit in 1868. "Go where I would, east or west, north or south, I still plashed and rippled in flower-gems." Muir was certainly dazzled, but not enough to ignore his naturalist's instincts; he carefully noted that this rich flower bed was nearly 400 miles long, 30 miles wide, and had denser displays than the surrounding foothills: one square yard he studied contained 16 species of plants and 165,912 open flowers.

Sadly, the great ocean of Central Valley blossoms that so enchanted and fascinated Muir is long gone. Fields of rice and cotton, as well as orchards and vineyards, long ago replaced the expanses of spring wildflowers; now subdivisions and sprawl are replacing the farms. Even in places where crops weren't planted, plowing for pasture disturbed the ground enough for exotics to invade and choke out the natives. Today there are no big displays of native wildflowers left in the Central Valley, and only a handful of smaller, more remote valleys are still pristine enough to have blooms reminiscent of those recorded by Muir.

"This type of wildflower display is a relatively rare phenomenon to begin with," says Steve Edwards, a California native plant authority and director of the East Bay Regional Parks Botanic Garden near Berkeley. According to Edwards, only two other places in the world - remote regions of South Africa and southwest Australia - have the combination of geology and dry Mediterranean climate needed to create such shimmering seas of wildflowers.

Surprisingly, Edwards says that some of the largest remaining valley displays owe their survival, in part, to cattle ranching. His own observations indicate that grazing is compatible with flowers as long as cattle aren't left in one area too long. It's better than plowing, he says. "Ranchers and environmentalists should be the strongest of allies," insists Edwards. "They both want open space that is free of development."

Although you can still find good wildflower displays on many California hillsides, Edwards and other experts rank three remote areas among the best of the last places where expansive shows of valley wildflowers can be found today: Bear Valley northeast of San Francisco, the Carrizo Plain east of San Luis Obispo, and Antelope Valley near Lancaster. In a good year, all boast valley wildflower displays that Muir would have appreciated.

Most California valley wildflowers bloom from late March into early May, but the key is rainfall. Which is not to say that botanists understand the complex dynamics of wildflower life cycles well enough to accurately predict the bloom. "Early rains, late rains; a lot of this theorizing is arm waving," says Edwards. "But we can say that, overall, a long, wet winter and mild spring tend to produce the best wildflowers."

Given the unpredictability of this year's El Nino winter, a good strategy for wildflower-watchers is to plan trips for slightly earlier in the bloom cycle. Try to hit the absolute peak and you may miss the show. Two years ago, for example, a week of hot, dry wind burned out the poppies in Antelope Valley well before the town of Lancaster's annual California Poppy Festival.

Of course, that probably wouldn't have kept Muir from enjoying what was left of the show. He would have been down on his knees counting every bloom.

BEAR VALLEY

Dusty, gravelly Bear Valley Road meanders through a low border of blossom-spattered hills before straightening out in fields of blue lupine mixed with purple owl's clover, bright splashes of poppies, and pastures of massed tidytips and goldfields.

Sound grazing practices and the absence of plowing on ranches owned by families that have run cattle here for nearly a century make Bear Valley in Colusa County a de facto wildflower preserve, but there are no guarantees for its future. A recent proposal for a housing development at the south end of the valley has the American Land Conservancy scrambling to buy the property.

* Where: From I-5 at Williams (stop at Granzella's for picnic supplies), drive about 19 miles west on State 20, then north on Bear Valley Rd. for about 14 miles.

* When: In early March, rare adobe lilies sprinkle the south end of the valley. Blooms peak in the last half of April and fade rapidly as fields dry through May.