Carpets of color in nature’s garden
By Duane Furman
RIVER CROSSINGS
The Madera Tribune
How fortunate we are this spring to have the Parkway wildflower varieties spread out over hundreds of thousands of acres of foothills and often the valley floor in our area.
The early bloomers are great to see. These include fiddleneck, that blooms along the roadside and was named because the top of the plant with the orange blooms looks like the neck on a fiddle; wild mustard, which covers whole fields in yellow (my dad used to cook for us, “mustard greens” which one prepares like spinach, but didn’t taste as good to me); wild radish; popcorn flower, which often covers the hillsides like snow patches and is beginning to fade; bush lupine, which was so colorful around Hensley Lake; and numerous smaller flowers, as beautiful but only obvious when one is walking near them, or if they grow in abundant clusters.
The California poppies are still in abundance, and I’ve seen them blooming in a number of yards here in Madera. The goldfields, with small flowers that like to grow and bloom together, define the old railroad on road 602 as you approach Daulton, and they provide us with beautiful patches of gold that refuse to be ignored.
The ground lupine around Hensley Lake are showing foot-high blooms of lavender. The baby blue eyes have been showing up for about 10 days, and are mainly found on slopes that receive afternoon sun.
Recent bloom abundance is to be found in the brodiaea with their purple flowers on stems as tall as I’ve ever seen them, gilia with small pale violet masses of flowers in clusters perhaps 10 to 20 yards wide. One of my favorites, the monkeyflower, is just coming on. It likes wet places and is often found along the road where the culverts keep the area moist. These neat flowers look quite a lot like snapdragons and will be adding blooms for a while.
If you are a “Field Guide to North American Wildflowers” (from the Audubon Society) enthusiast you probably recognize all of the above and many more. It is satisfying to recognize and know the characteristics of the things we see.
Duane E. Furman, Ed.D., is a retired superintendent of Madera Unified School District who remains active in civic and environmental affairs. For more information on the River Parkway, visit www.riverparkway.org
