California's golden harvest

Between a cool, dry winter and a hot, dry summer, southern California gets a sprinkle of rain and comes briefly and gloriously alive.

Flowers appear from nowhere: on nondescript shrubs, cacti and, like magic, from dry gravel and seemingly dead brush.

Everywhere around Los Angeles, the United States, freeway embankments and hills are covered in yellow and purple. Private gardens burst with colour.

Natural tinderboxes

The sudden blooms are a reminder, as if one needed one, that this is a desert.

The flowers scramble for light and attention and in a few short weeks, they are gone.

Summer comes and the heat robs the hills of their green, turning them brown and ochre — natural tinderboxes waiting for a spark.

News watchers still remember the terrible brushfires in Los Angeles last year.

In spring, residents keep an eye on the wild flower season. It moves gradually north from San Diego county, up through Orange county, to Los Angeles county.

Websites offer updates and post photos of the best sites to see the flowers.

Apparently, the bloom this year is better than the previous few years but not as good as 2003, which was supposed to have been “off the charts''.

Some of the flowers include lupine, goldfields and red maids but the most iconic is the state flower, the California poppy. (Eschscholzia californica is a genus different from its infamous family member and has no potent alkaloids.)

It's a silky orange flower that blooms by the millions in select areas.

The native Americans of this area believed that the fallen petals from the orange flowers filled the ground with gold and it's easy to see why.

Early Spanish settlers, entranced by fields of poppies, called the flower the copa del ora or the “cup of gold''.

Follow the way

One of the best places to see the California bloom is in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, in northern Los Angeles county.

From Los Angeles, the best route goes north over the San Gabriel mountains along the stunning Angeles Crest Highway and down to the Mojave desert, near Lancaster.

At the reserve, nearly 13km of trails wind among millions of intensely hued flowers.

The blooming of the poppies is a well-loved phenomenon and there is often a long line of cars waiting to enter the park.

The trails near the park, some of which feature the most spectacular blooms, are crowded. However, the number of people falls dramatically further in.

The reserve is relatively small but there are restrooms and picnic tables.

A small interpretative centre offers some information on the flowers and their habitat. You can also take a look at the souvenirs on sale.

There are, of course, fields of poppies outside the park and some of them are almost as spectacular as those inside the reserve.

But as the reserve is near the hills, the views it offers from the higher trails are unmatched.

The colours are so intense and the flowers grow so densely in Antelope Valley that it feels like a dream.

The temptation to run through the fields towards a loved one is great but the plants are fragile and visitors are not allowed to go off the path.

Also, Mojave green rattlesnakes are common and, according to the park's official site, there have already been a few incidents of snakebites because of people running into the fields for photographs.

The poppies are protected and picking them, or any other wild flower, is prohibited.

Optimism unbound

Desert flowers are fascinating examples of how tenacious life is.

They lie dormant in hostile conditions for most part of the year, only to explode into existence for just a few weeks to get pollinated and start the cycle again.

It's hard not to be infected by the crazy optimism of the wild flowers and come back better prepared for a long summer ahead.

— Gautam Raja is a US-based freelance writer

Things to remember:

— Information source: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=627