This year’s wildflower show began in March, and will likely continue through August, moving from the deserts to the valleys to the mountains. When we get our drawings to clients and have a few free days, well… sometimes we just gotta hit the road.
Wildflower Road Trip
These shots were done in a Southern California loop: Gorman, Carrizo Plain and Antelope Valley. These are barren, windswept, parched zones of straw colored vegetation, rock and sand most of the year, but when they bloom, they really put on the color.
It seems some of the best floral displays are in roadside areas with less than ideal backgrounds, places most people drive by without suspecting they’re missing anything.
Perhaps that’s a good thing: In well known flower fields masses of people arrive with hordes of stomping feet, mashing the flowers into the ground all for the sake of a superbloom selfie. They lie on the plants, prance off the trails in groups, trundle around looking for that perfect, unique photo, arrive with home-grown fashion shoots in mind, anything that might look good in social media. Shooting from the trail is hard, since most of the plants have been smashed, their flowers mangled, stems broken. Hopefully the plants will manage to reseed for a future show.
Some things can’t be copied back home
For what it’s worth, these things can’t really be duplicated in gardens. There are just too many weeds, invasive plants and pests like snails that cause wildflower patches that fit in typical suburban landscapes to fail gradually over a period of years. In the end, you’ll probably have smothering foxtails, oats, filaree and other alien weeds instead of wildflowers. If you have a gravelly area, perhaps you can keep some California poppies around. In our garden, aggressive ravenous snails raze lupines to the ground, stripping off their leaves in a matter of days. Seedlings don’t stand a chance.
Here’s how our little patch of wildflowers worked
Our wildflowers were going to solve an issue for a non-irrigated space in the front yard. They would grow, bloom and re-seed without additional water. That was the theory, anyway.
Year one: prepare the soil, seed native wildflowers. The plants came up and we had poppies, tidy tips, gilias and clarkia. The snails crawled over and ate the lupines. We let the plants go to seed. The neighbor did us a “favor” and mowed the plants down, so no seeds.
Year two: install PVC pipes hammered into the ground to discourage lawn mowers. Prepare the soil again and re-seed. We had poppies, clarkia, baby blue eyes. The snails ate the lupines (lupine is typically included with native wildflower mixes). The flowers bloomed, went to seed and did not get mowed by the neighbor. When everything was dry, I cut it down and scattered the stems around the wildflower patch.
Year three: grass seeds blew in, along with cranesbill (scissor plant), sow thistles… It’s really hard to tell sprouting weeds from sprouting wildflowers (except poppies), so you have to wait until they’re a bit bigger. We get cranesbill, foxtail, poppies, clarkia and a couple of baby blue eyes. A valley oak sprouts in the wildflower area.
Year four: we try some native bulbs. More weeds, fewer flowers, one bulb flower (blue dicks).
Year five: we’re pretty much down to weeds, poppies and clarkias. The bulbs did not survive, even though they should have (locally native, right soil, no summer water…). We plant a ceanothus and a western redbud, both native.
Year six: the oak thrives, the redbud and ceanothus are happy. The only wildflowers are poppies and clarkia. We plant some Spanish lavender and Jerusalem sage.
Year seven: the oak continues to grow, the ceanothus and redbud bloom. A few poppies and clarkia. One lavender dies, another thrives (two different named varieties). The Spanish lavender nearby thrives, no irrigation, been there for years. The Jerusalem sage blooms.
Year eight: We prune the oak for more upward growth. The ceanothus now hides the neighbor’s junk, as does the ceanothus. The lavender spreads and thrives. There are a few poppies and sometimes something else, but the wildflowers have pretty much left the party. A large patch of poppies spreads in the back yard, growing in the gravel paths, where we leave them alone.
Current situation: the oak is growing well, and will soon shade everything as it should. The ceanothus and redbud thrive, the lavender and Jerusalem sage come back every spring to flower, then go dormant in the dry season. We add some seedling red yuccas (Hesperaloe) to see what happens. They have long tap roots, so hopefully they’ll thrive with everything else, still growing without irrigation in normal years (I poured a little bit of water on the shrubs and trees during what would have been the rainy season during the drought years). We’re lucky if we get a poppy or two, even when we chop out the grasses and other weeds. We can’t dig up the soil since this would be bad for the oak’s feeder roots.
Photography notes
It’s almost always windy, and unless you get there on a rare cloudy day, sunny and contrasty. If you arrive at dawn or dusk, the poppies will be closed.
What to do? Take advantage of the situation: go early or late, use the wind to create artistic effects, shoot California poppies from the side where it won’t matter so much if the flowers are closed, since they’re vertical. Stand where you cast a shadow on the blooms for close-up shots to eliminate the contrasty hot sun and let the flower’s colors come through.
Shooting near dawn and dusk also eliminates most of the hordes of people snapping selfies with their cell phones. If they do show up, you can use a neutral density filter with a long exposure time to make them disappear, at least in your images.
A lot of these places are great for flowers, but wide angle shots show things like antennas, windmills, billboards… so use a telephoto lens to pull the flowers together and eliminate the distracting elements. Where the scenery is great, get up close with a wide angle to capture the flowers and their background. A gradient neutral density filter (if you’re using a camera instead of a phone) can help keep the sky from being too bright and blowing out.
Magnificent story! Pleins de super detail!