The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower & fruit, and they do it . . . as the rain permits. . . . One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring.
Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain, 1903
This year, I’m on a spring wildflower hunt. I’m thinking that it has been a wet winter; the wild mustard greens have already sprouted and will soon make a lovely addition to lunchtime salads. Surely this means I’ll have a moment on flower-bedecked hills, rolling and laughing with the desert mariposa lily, getting dusted by fairy duster, bewitched by the variety of purples emitted by verbena, and sleeping with the bees inside an orange globemallow. I’m already lost in the idea of a field of spring bloomers. But will it happen this year?
Spring flowers need late fall precipitation and sunshine to sprout. Remember last year’s hurricanes Norbert and Odile? Yes, how could we forget the nearly statewide deluge, which created 100-year flooding events in places? Remember how afterward the grasslands stayed green and some grasses even started to flower a second time? Because the grasses were still in their full glory late into the season, this could have prohibited the widespread germination of some shaded spring wildflower seeds that need sunshine to burst forth.
Spring bloomers also need steady precipitation throughout the winter to stay alive. November was warm and dry. If spring wildflowers sprouted during the late monsoon deluge, they might not have made it through that drying November—or did they, protected under a blanket of thick grasses and moist soils?
Much of Arizona was blessed with moisture from December through February. This looks good for our flowering friends: seeds could have sprouted in December and really started to grow with the warmer temperatures.
Now the question is whether hot temperatures and high winds this spring will dry out our plants before they get a chance to bloom, or will we continue to receive enough rain to spur on those flowers? We won’t know until we see it, but I’m rooting for the little ones. After all, like Mary Austin said, desert plants are really good at their duty to flower and fruit. Even if we don’t see hillsides bedecked with our favorite species, I bet somewhere in the grasslands and pine-oak woodlands, there will be a microhabitat in full bloom. Just follow the hummingbirds—they know the way. Happy hunting!
Learn more about climate patterns at at www.climas.arizona.edu and more about wildflower blooms at www.desertmuseum.org (the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum).
Molly McCormick is the Restoration Project Manager/Outreach Specialist for Borderlands Restoration.