Wild Flower Hotline March 7, 2025

Welcome to the Theodore Payne Foundation’s 42nd year of the Wildflower Hotline. The Hotline offers weekly on-line and recorded updates on the best locations for viewing spring wildflowers in Southern and Central California. All locations are on easily accessible public lands and range from urban to wild, distant to right here in L.A.

Along the Mariposa Trail in the Irish Hills Natural Reserve in San Luis Obispo County, wildflowers are beginning to exhibit an early bloom. Colorful specie s should add to the display over the next few weeks if predicted storms release more life-giving rainfall. Look for the earliest of California’s wildflowers, red maids, milkmaids, blue dicks, chocolate lilies, hummingbird sage, shooting stars, buttercups, and California golden violets. Not a flowering plant, but the abundant gold back fern provides a lush green background for the nearby flowering beauties.

Travel across the valley into the Southern Sierra foothills. This region was fortunate to have good mid-winter rainfall and wildflowers should be nice throughout the spring. The redbuds are now flowering and dot the near and distant vista with their fuchsia-pink blossoms. Eastman’s fiddleneck and popcorn flowers are seen stippling the hillsides with yellow and white flecks of color. Catch sight too, the silver bush lupines with their blue floral spikes poking above silvery foliage. Here and there on north facing hillsides, shooting stars are in early bloom.

Also, in that area along a short 10-mile stretch of Hwy 223 between Arvin and Hwy 58, some wildflowers were observed growing in the pastoral landscapes that dominate this section of the highway. While not in abundance, there are nice displays of annual lupine, fiddlenecks and popcorn flower. Please be cautious and pull off the road if you want to inspect flowers more closely.

At the California Botanic Garden in Claremont, springtime buds and blooms are awakening from their winter dormancy. Plants along the maze of picturesque trails include coral-colored desert globemallow, various ceanothus, California redbud, California buttercups, sticky monkeyflower in a variety of warm colors. Your senses will be overwhelmed by fragrant and colorful sages as well. Several different species of perennials belonging to the sunflower family are brightening up the garden with their ubiquitous golden yellow flowers.

That’s it for this week. Visit the Wildflower Hotline website to see photos of these and more wildflower sites. The Theodore Payne Foundation’s. annual Native Plant Garden Tour is April 5 & 6. Tickets are now on sale. Check the TPF website theodorepayne.org for details. The next report will be available on Friday, March 14th.