Tag Archives: daisy

Wildflower Fields, Carrizo Plain

Wildflower Fields, Carrizo Plain
Yellow and purple wildflowers from plain to hills, Carrizo Hills National Monument

Wildflower Fields, Carrizo Plain. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Yellow and purple wildflowers from plain to hills, Carrizo Hills National Monument.

This is a straight up “look at all the flowers!” photograph, made just before the seasonal peak of the bloom in the Carrizo Plain. Something like this happens in many places in California that seem almost desert-like during most of the year. Once winter rains start (and if it isn’t a drought year…) there is sudden appearance of new plant life in the middle of winter, and these dry places start to turn green. The process continues until some point in March, during what I like to call the “impossibly green season,” when whole hillsides become greener than you might imagine. Then there is a brief period in late March and into April, before the grasses again go dormant, when wildflowers may appear in abundance.

If you visited this location during most of the year you would likely describe it as a very dry and hot place, and you might even be tempted to regard it as desert. But when I visited this year and extensive spring bloom was just getting underway. I photographed from just about the lowest point in a wide valley, at the edge of a dense field of yellow flowers. Beyond, the yellow flowers transitioned to equally dense fields of purple flowers. Then the yellow resumed and extend right on up the slopes of the distant mountains.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

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Spring Wildflowers

Spring Wildflowers
Bright yellow spring wildflowers carpet the hills of the Carrizo Plain National Monument

Spring Wildflowers. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Bright yellow spring wildflowers carpet the hills of the Carrizo Plain National Monument.

As I drove a bit deeper into the Carrizo Plain National Monument last week I encountered this scene along a section of gravel road. These yellow flowers — I believe they are a daisy known as monolopia — covered vast areas from the lowest levels of the plain on up to the slopes of the surrounding mountains. I made the photograph on a somewhat special morning that had begun with thick ground fog. Eventually the fog broke up to leave behind blue sky with scatted fluffy clouds.

These flowers are a very short-lived phenomenon here, and they don’t grow in such abundance every year. This has been a relatively good year for rainfall, and this area was hit by heavy rains from an atmospheric river storm a few weeks earlier. These wildflowers are opportunistic — in bad years they may barely make an appearance, but when the rains do come they make up for lost time and produce brief but astounding displays. (If you were to come back here in a bit more than a month you would find a very dry landscape and very few flowers.)


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

Blog | About | Flickr | FacebookEmail

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.


All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.