The "California" section of today's Los Angeles Times features a front-page article with three images of Chino Hills State Park and concerns so-called "superblooms," or the profusion of wildflowers now carpeting our landscape thanks to the copious amounts of rainfall we experienced this past winter.
The piece identified seven locations, most outside of the greater Los Angeles area, but also including the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, as well as our local state park. Of the three photos, however, two of them actually show the overabundance of black mustard, which, while striking for its bright yellow blooms, are an incredibly invasive and destructive plant.
Brought to California by Spanish missionaries in the late 18th century, black mustard take over before native plants get a chance to make headway, deny the natives sunlight and water with hyper-aggressive growth and then, when dry, become a huge wildfire risk. Among the plants that are crowded out by this invasive are the state flower, the poppy, lupines, goldfields, and many others.
The third and largest image by Allen J. Schaben seemed to be chosen for its artistic merits, as he aimed his lens through a windmill at the Rolling M. Ranch (for a little history of the Rolling M, check out this 2010 post from this blog) and captured a hiker checking out some wildflowers, which are not all that visible. In any case, if you search for the online version of the article, the photos are different, though, frankly, a lot more spectacular and focus mainly on the bright orange poppies that we need far more of instead of the black mustard that we'll come to rue when the weather gets hot and wildfire risk escalates.
UPDATE, 11 April: Check this out from Newsweek:
