I hadn’t paid much attention to Bay Area wildflowers until this spring, even though I’ve spent most of my weekends outdoors since moving here nearly three years ago. Merely getting to know the amazing variety of landscapes near my home was enough: tide pools, lagoons, and cliffs along the ocean, redwood canyons filled with ocean fog, and then woodlands, savannas, and grasslands toward the Central Valley as the ocean’s influence diminishes. As I explored and began to recognize the different landscapes I learned their most prominent members first: the trees. But this year marked my second spring in the Bay Area and I had decided to learn the wildflowers.
After I spent a weekend hiking in Pinnacles National Monument, Elizabeth and I explored Mount Diablo each week for the next month, from late March through April, during the peak of the wildflower season. We enjoyed spectacular weather with clear skies and warm temperatures every weekend, typical of the early dry season. And we saw wildflowers come and go, slowly moving uphill as the days warmed. The entire mountain was abloom.
On March 28, we spent the morning in Mitchell Canyon, walking up Mitchell Canyon Road to Deer Flat and back. This was on the north side of the mountain, where the grasslands and savannas were radiantly green with a few orange poppies and yellow mustard swaying in the breeze. Above the fields hung scattered valley oaks budding with light green leaves. As we started up the dirt road from the visitor center, the grass was tall and luxuriant with little yellow buttercups poking out of it at knee-height.
The trailside was filled with blue dicks, orange fiddlenecks, and blue lupines. We also saw the occasional purple Western larkspur and violet Henderson’s shooting stars on red stems. On the exposed rocks along the trail we saw red larkspur and in the shade of oaks and bay we saw some hound’s tongue. We were delighted to spot our first few Mount Diablo fairy lanterns, but this display was paltry compared to the one we’d see a few weeks later.
I was excited to find some checker lilies growing in the grass near the top of the canyon, their green stems and leaves curving gracefully and their flowers nodding toward the ground. But the flowers are mottled purple and green from above which, combined with their grass-like stems and leaves, makes the plants inconspicuous. You have to look for them to find them, and once you do find them, you have to get close to appreciate them. Get down on your knees and have a look up to see their bold yellow pistils and stamens and alien purple and yellow petals.
On April 4, we joined some friends to hike to the summit of Mount Diablo, again on the north side of the mountain. In the grasslands and savannas we saw the same flowers as the week before: buttercups, filaree, mustard, fiddlenecks, blue dicks, and lupines. As we climbed out of Back Creek Canyon and into the chaparral we saw shrubs like ceanothus and blue witch blooming, as well as manroot, a vine, and paintbrush, Indian warrior, and Zigadene lily. The grassy patches on the Bald Ridge Trail were filled with wildflowers. Noteworthy were the baby blue eyes, California poppy, western wallflower, and purple owl’s clover. The flowers continued on the North Peak Trail, to the very top of the mountain.
I particularly enjoyed the bird’s eye gilia on the Bald Ridge Trail, where they completely carpeted some of the balds. They grow only in California, restricted to the Coast Ranges, the San Joaquin Valley, and the Sierra Nevada foothills. They are little flowers, each one about the size of a fingernail, and they might go unnoticed but for their numbers. A closer look reveals five dramatic petals whose faint lilac edges fade to white at their bases. In the center of each flower, five light blue stamens curve from a dark purple ring above its yellow throat.
On April 12, we explored the south side of the mountain, starting on Wall Point Road from Macedo Ranch. Blue-eyed grass, Ithuriel’s spear, and purple owl’s clover were blooming and the grass, although mostly green, was beginning to turn yellow. On the brief but enchanting Sunset Trail we saw a few Mount Diablo fairy lanterns on an east-facing hillside. Coming out of Pine Canyon, at the intersection of Little Pine Creek and Burma roads was a weedy patch thick with wild radish and mustard and filled with singing red-winged blackbirds. Later, huffing up Burma Road, Elizabeth and I were startled by the sound of a rattlesnake on the side of the trail, but we easily avoided it.
On April 19, we returned to Mitchell Canyon, where we had started our wildflower exploration three weeks earlier. We didn’t have much time, so we we made a short loop on the Globe Lily Trail. I’d passed by this trail several times without knowing it, as there are no signs for it on Mitchell Canyon Road. Instead you have to take either the Black Point or Red Road trails a short distance to get to it. But seeking it out is well worth the effort, for it’s a short and sweet single-track through woodlands, chaparral, and grasslands with excellent views of Mitchell Canyon and the hills around it.
We turned on to the Globe Lily Trail and rose into the hillside chaparral, where the yerba santa was starting to bloom with clusters of white trumpet-shaped flowers. Underneath the yerba santa was the fascinating but terribly named clustered broomrape. It was a little yellow plant, completely yellow. It has no chlorophyll but instead takes water and nutrients from the roots of a host plant. It’s a parasite.
The Globe Lily Trail gets its name from the Mount Diablo fairy lantern, which is also known as the Mount Diablo globe lily. We’d only seen a few of them before, but we hit the trail at just the right time and saw hundreds on this day’s’ loop. Their abundance was made all the more remarkable by the fact that Mount Diablo and its surrounding hills are the only place on earth where they grow at all. They belong to the fairy lantern clade of the attractive genus Calochortus. There are five species of fairy lantern in California, all of them endemic, and all of them with restricted ranges. Their common names – fairy lanterns, globe tulips, satin bells – hint at their beauty and form.
Back on Mitchell Canyon Road, the buttercups, blue dicks, and fiddlenecks from our first trip had started to fade and we only saw a few of them, but they had been replaced by bush lupine and Chinese houses. Chinese houses look superficially like lupine, their flowers forming tiered rings around the stem, and each flower splitting into vertical white petals on top and horizontal purple petals on the bottom. We saw occasional woodland stars, flowers I’d seen before but failed to identify. By the time we left, the sun was blazing over the fields and the temperatures were rising toward the 90s, a preview of the months to come.
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