California is on Fire!
Southern California’s hillsides are ablaze with gorgeous tapestries of wildflowers – orange poppies and ground pinks, golden fiddlenecks and bluebells, blue-eyed grass and native violets (they smell like peaches!). There are so many kinds of flowers – more blooms than anyone can remember seeing before! Those flowers are in fragile native habitats you can destroy simply by walking through them.
How to visit wildflower habitat
- Stay on designated roads and walk on designated trails
- It may look romantic to have your photo taken lying in a field of flowers, but the weight of your body will kill the plants you are lying on. Dont’ do it.
- Wildflowers do not make good cut flowers so please don’t pick them. The seeds each flower makes is crucial for the next generation of flowers. You may want ony one, but so does the next person and the next and eventually, the plants – and their flowers – will disappear.
- Wildflower plants don’t make good garden plants either. If you want them in your garden, purchase seeds from a reputable company or organization like the Theodore Payne Foundation. Don’t dig up the plants, they won’t survive transplant.
- Be careful where you step. Stepping on a plant whether in flower or not, will destroy it.
- Leave only footsteps (on trails, not on plants) and take only memories (and a few dozen photos).
Just last week, my video crew and I were out on the trail, shooting a segment for an upcoming episode of A Growing Passion about this year’s super bloom.
That show will air in late April but in the meantime, please watch this video about wildflower etiquette before you go, so you can enjoy the flowers without killing them.
Enjoy the bloom!
