Page Revised: Jan 20, 2013

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Wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains - Photos of 1000 SMM species.

Archive - Previous “What's Blooming” reports.

Outdoors - The Calendar of Events for the Santa Monica Mountains NRA.

Wildfowers Facebook - A place where people can share about flowers.

SMM WildFlowers - The Park's popular wildflower app for the iPhone.

       Fall and Winter are the quiet time of the year for flower hunters in Southern California. It is actually a time when I can get in some good exercise in as I’m not continually stopping to look at the plants. Certainly the cool, fresh air and green, dust-free trails encourage a brisk pace. However, even now we can find flowers. There are almost always some of the past season’s flowers hanging around and some of the early spring flowers are blooming already. I’ve been seeing the chaparral current in bloom since last November and more recently bigberry manzanita and a few early individuals of bigpod ceanothus.  Some of the early annuals like the shining pepperweed are blooming nicely and this past week I ran across wild cucumber and a few scattered shooting stars. No doubt the warm weather they are predicting for this week will speed things up. It certainly looks like the ceanothus is poised to explode. Hopefully it’s not the start of a repeat of last year where a beautiful but dry winter prematurely ended the flower season for many species. Let me know what else you run into. As always, happy hunting and I'll see you on the trails.  – ed.

Contact Information: Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area 401 West Hillcrest Drive Thousand Oaks, CA 91360 805-370-2301 www.nps.gov/samo	If you would like to contribute to the wildflower report you can e-mail the editor at: Tony_Valois@partner.nps.gov or phone Tony at 310-457-6408
What’s Blooming on the web at www.researchlearningcenter.com/bloom or go to www.nps.gov/samo and click on “What’s Blooming”