Where Are the Wildflowers? 2021

This week I was excited to see my very first annual wildflowers of the year - a brown-eyed primrose and desert dandelion pair, growing in the shoulder across the street from the post office in La Quinta. Not quite fields of golden poppies covering the hills, but the ability of these tiny plants to burst from the dry desert soil year after year is awe-inspiring, nonetheless.

There's no doubt, the desert is dry this year, and the search for wildflowers is going to be more of a challenge than we've gotten used to in the last year or two of "superblooms". Let's take a look at the number of species seen each year, by month:

Data from the Wildflowers of the Coachella Valley project on iNaturalist.

With 55 different species observed blooming as of January 31st, it's clear that we're well behind 2020's pace - 67 species were blooming by this time last year, and in 2019 we were already seeing more than 100 different wildflower species, following a warm and wet fall that gave us the conditions for the greatest wildflower season in decades.

And yet, even as dry as this year has been, there are still dozens of different wildflower species blooming right now in the desert. Perennial plants like bladderpod, chuparosa, and ocotillo are flowering throughout the Coachella Valley. Hopefully the late-arriving rains over the last couple of weeks will be enough to bring up some more annual flowers to join them.

See you on the trail!

Ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens