Spring Wildflowers

She sat on a boulder in a sea of color at the bottom of the Superstition Mountains, balanced painfully on the turning point of her life.

The brittlebush staged a riot in yellow all around her, lapping like waves at her boulder and stretching without a break to the base of the gnarled volcanic mountains, where bighorn sheep stand watch and ghosts of lost treasures chase one another like bats at twilight. Bees hummed incessantly among the Van Goghish extravagance of cadmium yellow, frantically pollinating bushes each of which can produce 800 flowers and 50,000 seeds.

The brittlebush, a hardy relative of the sunflower, had produced record blooms all across Arizona in response to one of the wettest years in a century.

She hadn't known about the flowers when she set out in confusion from Los Angeles, a young woman seeking some trace of herself amidst the punched time clocks, quarreling parents, a floundering marriage, blunted expectations, and unanswered questions. She fled the city with no real plan, just a half-filled suitcase and an Australian shepherd. But sitting on her igneous island, the puzzle boxes of her life seemed for the moment of less consequence than the hypnotic humming of the bees.

Wildflowers can do that.

I spent the spring chasing rumors of wildflowers, hoping to define their essence, sketch their ecology, and explain their allure here on this printed page. I encountered her halfway through that aimless journey, protruding just above the sunny expanse as though waiting for the filming of The Wizard of Oz to resume. We sat and talked as the setting sun experimented drunkenly with color. The brittlebush glowed as we watched the red-orange globemallow close for the night.

Make no mistake, flowers have conquered the world. Flowers evolved over a hundred million years ago as an ingenious way for plants to con insects into becoming their reproductive allies. Scents ranging from perfumed excess to imitation carrion, energy-rich nectar that sometimes harbors vitamins essential to preferred pollinators, and the shape and color of the flowers themselves all became blandishments for bees, birds, bats, and beetles.

Color remains the most noticeable comeon, designed not for human eyes but for the specialized vision of certain pollinators, ranging into the ultraviolet glow visible only to the multifaceted orbs of many insects. The flowers preferred by the workhorse bees mostly blossom yellow. Flowers that set their lures for hummingbirds prefer a lascivious red, a signal that they hold enough concentrated nectar to make a stop worth the energy the hummer must expend by hovering.

Often those flowers are shaped to deny access to bees and other insects, to make sure that only hummingbirds pick up that crucial dusting of pollen that they'll bear directly to another red blossom of the same species, their inexorable appetites driving them to perhaps 10,000 blossoms daily.

These innovations worked beautifully. Pollinators helped spread plants across the continents. All the rest of us followed happily along in their wake.

This ancient alliance between flowers and the rest of us takes place in the desert with a special passion, where this burst of spring and late summer growth determines survival in a harsh land.

Each spring a heart-stopping array of flowers bursts into bloom on desert slopes too harsh for even weeds most of the year. Luminous poppies, luscious lupine, laden chuparosa, riotous brittlebush, leafy globemallow, sand-loving verbena, swayingdesert marigolds, startling Indian paintbrush, and demure owl clover remain merely the gaudy headliners in a wildflower cast of thousands.

WILDFLOWERS:

Botanists and desert rats have lavished lifetimes on understanding the vagaries of these desert wildflowers, which have evolved oversize seeds that can lie in the soil for decades awaiting that perfect combination of rain and sun. Many experts say steady rains starting in October and November and continuing without any prolonged dry spells or hard freezes produce the best outpouring.

But despite all the studies and rain gauges, wildflowers remain irredeemably capricious. A hillside covered with poppies one year may remain barren the next. One slope may sing with brittlebush, while a similarly facing incline nearby remains forlorn.

That unpredictability plays havoc with the creatures whose life cycles remain linked to this annual floral extravagance. Tiny hummingbirds undertake continent-spanning migrations to remain on the edge of spring as it shifts from the tropics to the pine-scented northern forests. Bees stay in place but convert nectar and pollen into honey to carry themselves through the winter. Moths and butterflies synchronize their metamorphosis to these seasonal displays, responding to good years with population explosions.

Seedeaters like the thirstless kangaroo rat even out this floral boom-bust by hoarding seeds gathered in the good years in underground burrows they and their kin may occupy for generations. In the process, they shape vegetation in the area, sometimes spelling the difference between grassland and desert scrub.

The other plant eaters also respond to the vagaries of the spring blooms. Elk, deer, and javelina all have preferred floral delicacies, drawing enough extra energy from certain plants during certain years to increase their reproduction. Quail orchestrate the number of eggs they lay each year by the Vitamin A content of the tender green springtime annuals.

The effects of the flowers ripple outward all across the ecological pool, finally touching everyone from the whirring hummingbirds to the lurking mountain lions whose reproduction and survival remain linked to the populations of the flower eaters.

But I didn't bother passing along such details to the woman as she sat on the boulder, soaking in some inexpressible truth about wildflowers. I didn't have much helpful advice to offer about the interlocked dilemmas of her life. Sometimes I think I know even less about people than I do about flowers. Just as well. I think she had already given up on pat answers, one of the insights born of the confrontation with limits we call maturity.

Instead we just sat and watched the flowers swaying in the breeze while the horizon to the west flamed out in a glow the exact color of globemallow. Then we picked our way through the bushes to the trail, a barely clear path through the mass of yellow.

I wished her luck. She said she figured things would work out, one way or another. She looked almost happy. Life's like that, unpredictable and as full of promise as a slope seeded with wildflowers.

I headed for home, catching the tail end of rush hour along the Superstition Freeway. Preparing for a shower, I looked down at my jeans. They were smudged with yellow pollen as though I'd brushed against the palette in a mad painter's studio. So I stood for a while in my bedroom in the glow of artificial light, holding my pollen-stained jeans, recalling the sound of bees.

PENSTEMON AND FIDDLENECK

(ABOVE) Parry's primrose and cobblestone fiddleneck color a wash in the Ajo Mountains. LARRY ULRICH (BELOW) A stately saguaro reigns over a crowd of penstemon in the Santa Catalina Mountains. EDWARD MCCAIN (RIGHT) A saguaro skeleton offers a rough backdrop for delicate penstemon in Saguaro National Park. MARK S. THALER

WILDFLOWERS ORTFOLIO BRITTLEBUSH AND OWL CLOVER

(LEFT) Brittlebush clings to a slope at the Grand Canyon, high above the Colorado River. EDGAR CALLAERT (ABOVE) Sunny brittlebush flourishes throughout the Sonoran Desert. ROBERT CAMPBELL (BELOW) Chain cholla and other cacti provide a prickly counterpoint to a display of yellow brittlebush and purple owl clover. JACK DYKINGA

LUPINE, OWL CLOVER, AND PENSTEMON

(ABOVE) Fragrant lupine blossoms peak in March and April. JAMES TALLON (BELOW) Lupine and Parry's penstemon bedeck Alamo Wash in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. JACK DYKINGA (RIGHT) A sprig of lupine invades a field of owl clover in the Tonto National Forest. JERRY SIEVE

GOLDEN POPPIES, LUPINE, AND OWL CLOVER

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 28 AND 29) Brittlebush and lupine contrast with the cacti near Diablo Canyon in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. EDWARD MCCAIN (LEFT) Multicolored poppies close when the sun hides behind a cloud. JERRY SIEVE (ABOVE) Golden poppies may be the most photographed wildflower in the Sonoran Desert. DEBS METZONG (BELOW) Poppies, desert lupine, and owl clover decorate a field near Kitt Peak, MARK S. THALER