DESERT SPRING, THE TIME OF PLENTY

The Frenzy Called Spring

"When faces called flowers float out of the ground. . . ."

"Don't get me wrong. I love rock and sand, snow and sky, fishing and hiking, but for sheer delight, give me the wildflowers of a desert spring. If I could invent myself a full-time job, it would be official spring-watcher, and I'd rely on a calendar told by birds and plants, not by the tilt of planets.

Even though frost seldom visits Arizona's low desert, and snow is rare, winter can be blustery, dark, and much too chilly. So thoughts of spring start early, in December, when the winter rains urge seeds to sprout. If we're lucky, by January the verdant sheen of spring will carpet the ground with tiny blades of grass and leaves of mallows, evening primroses, verbenas, and lupines.

Ajo lilies probe the surface, testing the weather. If they approve, they'll grow as high as your pockets and set dozens of white flowers. As a spring-watcher, I know that if the ajos are plentiful and ankle-high by New Year's, we'll probably have a floral show worth bragging about.

The factors are obvious: rain, temperature, sun, seeds - but the proper mix makes it a difficult equation. Rain needs to be at the right time and in the right amounts. It takes at least a half inch to trigger most seeds. El Niño years seem to do this best, but we still need to factor in thetemperature during and after the rain, soil warmth, and the amount and angle of sunlight. Then we must add in frosts and the nutrients in the soil. A good flower crop one year likely uses up much of the nitrogen, so seldom are there two bumper crops in a row. Some factors we may not even realize yet. Each year the city newspaper asks a local botanist to predict the next great flower show, but it's impossible to be a hundred percent correct, so even he's given up, preferring to just enjoy what comes.

This helps explain why many of us have been disappointed by our personal attempts to scatter wildflower seeds and water them to success. I've sown, raked, and watered, but plants, like Goldilocks, need things "just right" to do their best. The saguaro cactus, for example, may have a good crop of young ones only three or four times a century, and some wildflower seeds may lie dormant for decades before being stirred by the exact combination.

After the year's shortest day passes, we note the mornings when we no longer need headlights driving to work and when a tree, prized for its shade and wood, seems uncanny in its ability to judge spring's advent, though the native bees wish that it would start blooming sooner. On average, mesquites leaf out in my yard on March 17, remarkably close to "official" spring.

Later the catclaws and white-thorn acacia trees, which shun winter even more than the mesquites, make up for their tardiness with clouds of fragrant flowers. The blooms of bebbia, also known as "chuckwalla's delight" because it is that lizard's favorite food, draw hundreds of checkered skipper butterflies. The parasitic herb desert broomrape, hidden by its host plant, reveals itself to the world with gaudy purple petals.

Bushes of humble trixis, goldeneye, and green brittlebush or rayless encelia, which we otherwise wouldn't even notice, rave with yellows. Coyote gourds open and close their golden flowers before the morning's can leave our jackets at home. There's a little more light at dawn and a lot more hope in our hearts.

Then one morning, we hear the mating call of the mourning dove, that plaintive murmuring song announcing nesting time. It will rise to a crescendo in April and May, when joined by the who-cooks-for-you call of returning white-winged doves. Some days their songs fill entire valleys. A New Yorker asked me to hold the phone outside just so he could listen to the doves.

Other desert dwellers have their own ideas about the start of spring. In February side-blotched lizards creep out of their hidey-holes as the days warm, and they sun themselves on rocks, hoping that beetles will soon hatch. Rock squirrels leave hibernation to hunt for food, and if we're lucky we'll glimpse a coyote pup or a desert bighorn lamb. Cactus wrens build nests. Hummingbirds steal spiderwebs to twine dainty cups for two pea-size eggs.

Among the first flowers of the new year are bladderpods and brittlebushes, forming bright-yellow patches amid the brown chaff of winter. We hike into the desert and spot the red wands of ocotillos. Pinpoint flowers of spiny herb contrast with oversize sacred daturas. Mats of purple nama carpet the ground between taller plants, and we lie on our bellies to gaze into white desert stars. We know that spring is coming.

Some old-timers swear that the end of winter is best measured by the mesquite tree, which announces the passing of the last frost by sending out new leaves. This full sun. Even the staid and cautious creosote bush flatters itself with a glorious flurry of yellow flowers.

Everybody in Arizona has a favorite story about a meeting with spring flowers. A friend of mine traveled the same backcountry road for six years and thought he knew the plants there quite well. But in the seventh year, he was astounded to find fields of blue stemless primroses, or sand lilies, which grow for a couple of months from bulbs in the usually seared and vacant sands and then lie dormant for years.

(PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 20 AND 21) Lupines and Mexican gold poppies crowd the west slope of the Superstition Mountains. CHUCK LAWSEN I've traveled to a number of places to see wildflowers. As a kid, my first flower tour was when the family made a day outing along the Apache Trail, east of Phoenix. I remember to this day the golden slopes of poppies and yellow brittlebushes accented with deep-pink Parry's penstemons and purple lupines. Another time we went to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument along the Mexican border. It was glorious with owl clover, Mexican gold poppies, desert marigolds, and wild morning glories.

In recent years, I have found some less traveled places to hunt for spring. One of these is an unnamed canyon in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. It slices through granite, and its sands make good soil for a number of plants. Bighorn sheep and desert tortoises live here, too. The sun bounces off the canyon walls to warm seeds, so flowers bloom early. Stands of red chuparosas attract hummingbirds here when they are scarce anywhere else.

Another special place is the Mohawk Dunes between Yuma and Phoenix, where the purple sand verbena spreads across the sands and tracks of lizards and foxes scribe the surface with the stories of their travels. Swatches of sweet-scented desert sunflowers sweep to the horizon.

How does my own bird and plant calendar stack up against the one on your wall? Over the last eight years, I've kept weekly records of what I see around my home in the desert near Tucson. I chart flowers blooming and leaves falling, birds nesting, and coyotes whelping. Whitewinged doves have arrived at my door as My own memories include a hike through knee-high primroses, ajo lilies, and lupines. The next year, the sands were blowing, and only a few scattered petals showed on the tan ground. Part of the definition of desert is that it's drier some years than others, so we who live here come to appreciate the times of plenty and, in times less bountiful, to respect the few flowers that do bloom. After a wet winter, it's common to see globemallows chest high, but in dry times, an admirable mallow may reach only four or five inches and struggle to set a single flower.

Invariably after my spring hikes, I reach for an identification book on the shelf even before taking a shower. Once I headed home a day early from a remote desert mountain range to learn the name of a dainty plant I'd never seen in all my trav-els. It turned out to be a desert five-spot, and on the whole hike I saw only four of them, all on one bank above an arroyo.

The flowers with short lives are enchanting, but the old standbys bloom year in and year out. Yellow paloverde blossoms drift in windrows like fresh-blown snow. Ironwood trees, with their small pea flow-ers, flourish and roar with the sounds of bees gathering pollen.

By April we begin to see young cottontail rabbits and fledgling cactus wrens. If we're lucky, we'll even see a baby Gila monster fresh from the egg and looking like an adult in miniature. Hordes of orange and black blister beetles attack lupines on a slope, but by tomorrow the beetles have moved on. I mark the days.

Early as March 10 and as late as April 1. The average date? You guessed it: March 21, the start of spring, just like your calendar told you.

When is spring over? Some will say when the paloverdes drop their seeds; others, when the saguaros bloom in May and June. Perhaps it's when Gambel's quail chicks hatch and, as if on wheels instead of legs, race madly after their parents. Maybe it's when smoke trees burst into blazes of purple along the low washes. But spring's last whisper may be when the queen of the night cactus blooms, filling the air with such a powerful perfume that grown men have been known to swoon. A queen of the night cactus by my driveway has bloomed as early as May 20 and as late as July 10, but the average date is June 19, just two days off the "official" calendar.From now on I'll use the arrival of whitewings as my official beginning of spring, and I'll know it's over when the queen blooms.

The days grow hot. I sweat while sitting in the shade. Birds fledge. Wind blows buckwheat skeletons across the sand, and antelope ground squirrels stuff paloverde seeds into their cheeks. The pace of life slows under the heat, as if catching its breath from the frenzy called spring. The quail and I hunker down awaiting the dis-tant rains of summer.

Author's Note: To your own list of hot spots for viewing and photographing the desert in spring, you can add Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior; Phoenix Botanical Garden; Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson; Picacho Peak between Tucson and Phoenix; Pinal Pioneer Parkway; Tucson Botanical Gardens; the Wickenburg to Kingman highway, U.S. Route 93; Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument; Saguaro National Park near Tucson; the Apache Trail, State Route 88.

Seasonal wildflower information hotlines for Arizona's low desert include: Arizona Sonora-Desert Museum, (520) 883-1380, press 1.

Boyce Thompson Arboretum, (520) 689-2811.

Desert Botanical Garden, (602) 7548134.

But if you can't get out to enjoy the wildflowers, the following portfolio should lessen your disappointment.

(RIGHT) Dune primroses, sand sunflowers, and sand verbenas cover the plains along the Mexican borderlands in the Pinacate and Gran Desierto Altar. JACK DYKINGA