May 31, 2024 

Welcome! Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wildflower Hotline is made possible by donations and memberships. Please support the Hotline today! All locations are on easily accessible public lands and range from urban to wild, distant to right here in L.A. 

The Los Robles Trail, operated by the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency, has the best display of wildflowers in that region according to a recent visitor. The open space area is north and south of the 101 between Westlake Village and Newberry Park. Starting at the Oak Creek Canyon Loop, veer west to the Los Robles Trail and en d at the Los Padres trailhead. Black sage, deerweed, bush monkeyflower, canyon sunflower, California everlasting, elderberry and golden yarrow are abundant. In colorful patches growing along the trail, there are purple clarkia, elegant clarkia, California poppy, blue fiesta flower, and purple nightshade. The chaparral icons— California buckwheat, chamise, and bush sunflower are coming into bloom as well.  Photo-worthy Mariposa lily, fringed pink, prickly phlox, chia, popcorn flower, and cliff aster are scattered and less common. 

Lastly, it is a late season at the Wildlands Conservancy's Oak Glen Preserve. Situated in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains 4800 feet above the cities of Yucaipa and Beaumont, the Preserve offers a wide variety of wildflowers native to the Southern California mountains. The Southern California Montane Botanic Garden is just coming into full bloom, with five different species of penstemons, blue flax, California poppies, and phacelias amidst an arrangement of dozens of flowering shrubs. Hummingbird Hill and Ruth's Butterfly Garden feature native plants specialized for hummers and butterflies, respectively with a dazzling display of Eaton's firecracker, sulphur-flowered buckwheat, fuchsia-flowered currants, and others. Of particular interest to wildflower buffs is the Artist's Palette venue--a six-acre hillside along the entryway on Oak Glen Road. In past years the garden featured a wildflower rendering of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet's actual paint palette, created by separating native wildflower seeds by color and distributing wheelbarrows of seed to recreate the painter's palette across the hillside. This year a new garden exhibit will open. It is named "Sendero del Sol"--Trail of the Sun--featuring a "sun" of four native yellow and white wildflower species (tidy-tips, fiddleneck, popcorn flowers and gilias), surrounded by a blue-purple ”sky” of baby blue-eyes, desert bells, purple owl's-clover, globe gilia and tansy-leaved phacelia. The sun disk is 60 feet in diameter with 100-foot rays, surrounded by a 2-acre "sky", with poppies and phacelias and a mix of other wildflowers across the 4-acre road frontage and entryway. Visitors may also walk the 2.5-mile Stream Trail loop along a creek through the black oak and box elder woodlands, enjoying a piece of apple pie and cold apple cider afterward.  The Artist’s Pallet will be open with trails to the picnic table islands in a sea of wildflowers for the coming weekend. The bloom will continue for at least several weeks through the month of June—great news for wildflower lovers. For more information, please see the Oak Glen Preserve web site link in the written Wildflower Report. 


That’s it for the 2024 Wildflower Hotline season. Visit the Wildflower Hotline website to see photos of, and links to these and more wildflower sites. The next reports will be available Fridays, March through May 2025. Happy botanizing!