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Spring Wildflowers in CA

Spring Wildflowers in CA

Victoria Siegel

Exploring the east bay with my sons. Here is a quick link to the Nature hikes with kids map.

I have always loved herb walks, but now I have 2 little people to teach. My goal is to get my sons to know more wild plant names than me. I wish I could walk through a forest and point to more words I know than Pokémon. A child’s memory is astonishing… let’s see if we can get them to recover some of our lost knowledge!

Fun fact: words get replaced in the official dictionary every year, usually plant words replaced by tech words or acronyms. I want my sons’ vocab to showcase a deeper knowledge base- revealing where his youngest years were spent. tech stuff is made to be easy enough for old people to learn, so I’m not worried about him falling behind if he can’t code at 10 years old! And learning these words feels like resurrecting the dead! Or uncovering a long lost masterpiece.

Some Mentor-lead hikes in the East Bay:

Some Resources (there are so many to pick from!)

This beautiful laminated pocket guide for $10 (plus lots of other great children’s workbooks!)

I am a sucker for a beautiful picture. Or library book.

Instead of one mentor, I met many. In a world where mentors can be hard to find, I turn to books for help and guidance. 

Just think about it. Someone put years of their life into cK with incredible amounts of detail. Sure, it would be nice to have a personal mentor that knew everything about everything. But honestly, do you even think that exists? 

What does exist is a world of books written by experts that can teach you anything you want. So, I have compiled a list of my favorite field guides and plant books to spark some other people’s interests.

Introduction to California Spring Wildflowers

It surprised me to learn how old the original publishing date was on this small pocket guide. How different was the world back in 1892? The fact that we are still republishing the same book over 130 years later - fact checking no longer used names - some species merging into others, or being split into subspecies - is a natural wonder! The author was a professor and Dean of Botany, associated with the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden in LA.

Naming of plants seems like such an external thing, but there is significant research to get people to all be on the same page about the millions of plants and possible mis-interpretations. When naming a thing, there are certain sources that hold more sway than others. But it kind of makes me laugh to think big picture, it comes down to some kind of vote or concensus for some human to say THIS is THE name we will all go by this now.

Some plants have poisonous cousins, so it can be a big deal to WRITE about the differences, but nothing is as powerful as teaching a human to learn the difference in the wild. I just want to be able to point to a plant and have some familiarity with it myself. Are you the same flower I saw last week somewhere else?

Anyways, this book covers flowers all over California, a lofty goal, spanning desert and ocean and forest species. California has been long considered an earthly paradise. Some experts agree to over 6,000 different flowering plants un the state. We can remove thousands of those considered grasses, and still have thousands to sort through.

So here is a list of the wildflowers by color (work in progress). (I will be adding photos to be an easy guide!)

White

  • Star Water-Plantain

  • Broad-Fruited Bur-reed

  • Star Lily

  • Slim Solomon’s seal

  • Hooker’s Fairy Bells

  • Sierra Fawn Lily

  • White Fairy Lantern (Globe Lily)

  • Butterfly Mariposa Lily

  • Muilla

  • Yucca (Our lord’s candle)

  • White (or western) trillium

  • California lady’s slipper

  • Yerba mansa (lizard’s tail)

  • Western wood anemone (windflower)

  • Pipestems (clematis)

  • Cream cups

  • Coulter’s Matilija Poppy

  • Chicalote (prickly poppy)

  • Redwood ivy (Vancouveria lanipetala, from the captain who visited the CA coast in 1792)

  • Hairy fringepod

  • Shepherd’s purse (found in almost every vacant lot below a certain elevation. When ripe, the flower reveals yellow seeds - the “golden coins” in the shepherd’s purse

  • Milk maids - one of the earliest spring flowers, in Jan/Feb

  • Bitter Root

  • Miner’s Lettuce - EDIBLE, eaten by miners, pioneers, and Native Americans

  • Candy Flower

  • Beach Starwort - once common, now more scarce

  • Common Chickweed - non-native in many lawns and parks, edible

  • Large-leaved Sandwort/Sand-spurrey

  • Crystalline Iceplant - popular groundcover, from Africa, turns pink as they age

  • California Buckwheat

  • Umbrella Plant (Indian Rhubarb) - grows along banks of rapid streams

  • Hill Star

  • Honey Dew (sweet drop of liquid from the flower, VERY fragrant, beautiful smell)

  • Beach Strawberry

  • CA Blackberry

  • Oceanspray (Cream Bush) - does not flower the first several years, but once it does, it makes a hanging spray of flowers, that stick around year round until the new flowers come the next spring

  • Chamise (Greasewood)

  • Dense-flowered platycarpos

  • Spanish clover

  • Bigpod ceanothus

  • Salal

  • Greatberry/Shaggy-barked Manzanita - has small reddish fruit, meaning “little apple”

  • Western Azalea - found along streams or other damp places

  • Snowdrop bush

  • Western Morning glory

  • Devil’s lantern (Lion-in-a-cage, or Basket evening primrose) - grows on sandy desert

  • Bicolored Linanthus

  • Flax-flowered linanthus

  • White flowered navarretia

  • Yerba Santa

Red




Blue




Yellow




Trees







First Blooms of the Year! Manzanitas

First Blooms of the Year! Manzanitas
Herbal First Aid Kit

Herbal First Aid Kit
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