Dreamy Wildflowers

"Living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower." -Hans Christian Andersen LAST YEAR PROVED A FANTASTIC ONE for delicate blooms all across Arizona's deserts. Uncultivated beauty emerged from the soil, untended by humans, yet dazzling and powerful enough to enrich our lives. Luminous and surreal, the fields bursting with random color reminded us of all the forces we cannot control and all of nature's secrets, which far exceed our own imaginings.

Fields of Dreams A WILDFLOWER PORTFOLIO

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 24 AND 25] The languid caress of a misty spring sunrise awakens blue phacelias, Mexican goldpoppies and cholla cacti in the Superstition Wilderness. JEFF SNYDER [LEFT] A beavertail cactus stands among sienna-hued volcanic rocks northwest of Kingman. In the distance, are the Hualapai Mountains. ROBERT MCDONALD [ABOVE] Mexican goldpoppies, lupines and owl clover crowd a meadow below the Quinlan Mountains. BRUCE GRIFFIN

PORTFOLIO

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes up to the top." -Virginia Woolf

PORTFOLIO

"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 28 AND 29] Dawn reveals a springtime symphony of color and light. Cholla cacti with spines ablaze, lupines, brittlebushes and Mexican goldpoppies join the ensemble.

[ABOVE] Seasonal plant life flourishes where a many-armed desert giant grows in a hidden canyon in the Superstition Wilderness. BOTH BY JACK DYKINGA [RIGHT] A blanket of Mexican goldpoppies, lupines and coral-colored globemallows profit from an extraordinary season of rain. NICK BEREZENKO

PORTFOLIO

Each dream finds at least its form.

Gustave Flaubert [LEFT] Below the Quinlan Mountains on the Tohono O'odham reservation, a field of Mexican goldpoppies stretches to the horizon. JACK DYKINGA [ABOVE] A brittlebush in bloom provides the foreground for a sweep of magenta-colored owl clover and the distant Superstition Mountains. ROBERT MCDONALD

PORTFOLIO

"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." -John Updike [LEFT] Morning stirs Mexican goldpoppies in the Superstition Wilderness. JEFF SNYDER