Time Nears For State’s Golden Poppy Season To Bloom
GOLDEN DAYS AHEAD
A scene at the expansive State of California Antelope Valley Golden Poppy Preserve.
John Muir in 1868 wrote of the endless “sea” of wildflowers that blanketed the 450-mile long and 40- to 60-mile wide Great Central Valley in the spring of that year.
“Go where I would, east or west, north or south, (it) still splashed with ripples in flower gems,” Muir noted.
California’s seemingly endless wildflowers also inspired countless authors including John Steinbeck who penned the following excerpt in “East of Eden”:
“On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.”