After heavy rain in California
Lee Poulsen (Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:11:45 PST)

On Jan 26, 2005, at 3:19 PM, Johannes-Ulrich Urban wrote:

Hi Uli,

The desert in bloom is an amazing thing to see. I have had the
opportunity twice; each time was in the spring of an El Niño year when
a much higher rainfall than average occurs. (Strangely, this winter
there is no El Niño occurring.)

The first time was more than ten years ago when a group of my friends
and I went camping during the week leading up to Easter in Death Valley
(which is now a National Park). The daytime temperatures were in the
low 20s °C -- very comfortable -- and the entire valley, which is stark
hot sandy desert completely surrounded by high mountains in the
summertime, was covered with flowers and even the bare sandy plain
areas were carpeted with this tiny 5 mm tall plant with a single pink
flower at the tip like a shimmering haze of green and pink that tinged
the sand as far as you could see. (I once camped there one night in the
summertime, early July, when the daytime temperatures are in the high
40s °C every day and the nighttime low temperatures only drop down to
around 35° C! And the campground was nearly full -- of Germans on
holiday! I was the only American in the campground...)

Then five or six years ago we went to see the wildflowers in Joshua
Tree National Park after a very rainy winter (in late March or early
April). When we first got there, we were wondering where all the
flowers were because we could only see a few from the car when we first
drove in (from the north side of the park). After a short drive we
stopped and got out to look around and we could not take a step
anywhere without stepping on something growing and flowering. Even
within all the desert shrubs were sprouting and blooming all kinds of
flowering plants. It was amazing. We saw flowers non-stop during an
entire day of driving slowly through the park and stopping at various
places. Since Joshua Tree straddles both a high elevation and a low
elevation desert, we were able to see many different kinds of flowering
plants. The one species we missed that I now wish we had taken the time
to drive to where they were reported to be blooming was the 'desert
lily' Hesperocallis undulata.
<http://calflora.net/bloomingplants/…>
<http://desertusa.com/mag98/mar/…> I have tried
to grow this from both seed and a mature bulb and it has never worked.
I think it may not be possible to grow and flower it in cultivation--so
you have to go to the desert to see it. It often stays dormant for
years deep under the surface of the sand. I have an uncle who owns a
property in the desert near the fisherman's town of San Felipe, Baja
California, Mexico on the Sea of Cortez, about 5 hours drive south of
here. He and my aunt told me about how one spring after the big El Niño
event in the mid-'80s they drove down there and got there late at night
and how the entire air was perfumed and in the full moon for as far as
they could see as they drove Highway 5 through the desert were fields
and fields of these lilies in full bloom where there was normally only
sand and rock and scrub. The locals told them this only happened every
20 years or so.

Maybe you will be lucky this year.
--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 9-10