Southland spring means less drama, more flora
This season is our pause between disasters, when our focus turns to flowers.
Winters are easy. Winters, we can look across the vast eastward miles and regard with pity the icebound, housebound millions in the manacles of winter.
So too their summers: sweaty, fleeting weeks of melting Popsicles, malodorous with bug repellent, the calendar countdown to hurricane season.
Autumns: a season of Facebook posts of leaves tinted by xanthophylls, carotenoids and anthocyanins. You can get nature’s same color impact by looking at egg yolks, flamingos and blueberries. Leaves end their lives sodden underfoot, or raked into picturesque bonfire heaps that fill the fall breezes with fragrant waftings of CO2 and photochemically reactive substances.
But spring? Our spring had always arrived on tiptoe and sat in the back row, the opposite of the ebullient temperate-zone season.
So Angelenos can be absolved of spring envy. Our Mediterranean-climate constancy doesn’t deliver the liberating, pagan exuberance of spring, like prison parole with greenery: Stravinsky music and maypoles, purple crocuses muscling their way through crusts of ice, hibernated human millions doffing their woolies the way snakes shed their skins, to clad themselves anew in sunlight and midweight cottons.
Here, we have to work for spring. We have to look, and look again. From our feet up, things feel pretty stable almost all the year; seismographs show wild zigs and zags, but in Southern California, temperatures live demurely within standard limits.
Daniel L. Swain is a climate scientist at UCLA and a California climate
fellow at the Nature Conservancy; you’ve met him here before. “Spring was kind of a reprieve. It’s as if climate and weather and natural hazards can take a breather,” Swain explains. “You do have fires, but not as bad as in summer and autumn. You can see floods, but usually not as bad, and heat waves, not as bad as summer and autumn.”
On our calendar of hazards, spring stands alone for the skimpiness of its drama. “There’s really no other season that checks all those boxes. Autumn isn’t flood season, but it sure is fire season. Summer sure is fire season if not necessarily peak fire season. For a place famous for relatively benign weather most of the time, California really is subject to a lot of significant extremes not obvious at the outset.”
What, then, to look for in an L.A. spring?
Its inaugural month, March, can have lamb-andlion fitfulness, sizzle to drizzle and back again.
May gray is the overture to June gloom, a damp cloudiness without actual cold (and often without actual rain). “We don’t get that in the fall,” Swain points out. “That’s one way spring is not symmetric with the transition to fall.”
But — with climate, it’s always about “buts” — don’t set that in stone. It’s all changing, warming. “We’re seeing summerlike temperatures bleeding into nonsummer months; the second half of spring increasingly gets summerlike temperatures. In California that means ‘drier.’ ”
It could even mean years of only two seasons — years, as Swain says, when the most notable difference in the Southern California year is “between summer and not summer, between the time of year when it sometimes rains and the
time of year it essentially never rains.”
We could even see a recurrence of the awesome — in the classic sense, not the current correct-changeat-Starbucks sense — California floods of yore. The great West Coast floods of 1862 sent down rains in Old Testament volumes, melted the snowpack and turned much of California into an inland sea, submerging towns, ranches, roads, people. Our three principal rivers — Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Santa Ana — overflowed and merged into an ocean, miles upon miles of water. The L.A. flood of 1938 tore out bridges and isolated the San Fernando Valley from the rest of the city.
In this future springtime, monster floods could reappear. “Southern California is likely on average to be a drier place than it used to be, yet punctuated periodically by really, really intense storms with very large floods,” cautions Swain. “We will have some decades where we remember the big floods more than the big fires. It’s kind of like a big earthquake on the San Andreas fault — no one has a recent memory of it
Blossoming tendrils of flowering jasmine put out enough scent to overpower, for a moment, the stink of gas leaf blowers.
because it hasn’t happened you close your eyes. in a long time, but it’s inevitable.” Botanist McDonough has spent a quarter-century
Now, to the spring flora, as the botanical information and the flowers we have consultant at the Los versus the ones we may Angeles County Arboretum. wish we had. So many things have confined
The effusion of bulb our spring floral outburst, flowers of the East and McDonough says — Midwest — the daffodils, humans’ relentless spread, hyacinth, freesia, tulips — the caprices of rainfall, and need a cold hibernation to chiefly, the temperatures: “I generate the scented show looked at the increase in they put on. They don’t get temperatures from the 1870s it here. to now, and you can see a
Like us, some plants can seven-degree increase in the adapt to L.A. These spring lowest temperatures, and a beauties do not. There were four-degree increase in the years when I tried to buck highest temperatures, the nature; I planted lily of the daily minimum and maximum. valley pips in L.A. soil, and That’s got to have to will them to grow and some effect.” bloom, I carried blenders Still, we can console full of crushed ice to pack ourselves with immigrant upon the earth, to try to flowers that Angelenos have fool the flowers into believing welcomed to their gardens, they were thousands like agapanthus and acacia, of miles farther and 50 cascades of wild jasmine, degrees colder than they and, at the Arboretum, were. The only thing it yellow irises that are regarded accomplished was probably elsewhere as a weed, to convince the neighbors says McDonough, an “aggressive that I was a lush who woodland bully.” started my mornings with a (Which makes me imagine a blender of frozen margaritas. swaggering tough threatening the other flowers with
We’d be churlish to complain. “This is my topsoil now, see? Blossoming tendrils So scram, if ya know what’s of flowering jasmine put out good for ya.”) enough scent to overpower, At the Arboretum, “we for a moment, the stink of do get calls: ‘Are your cherry gas leaf blowers. We have blossoms flowering yet’? what is supposed to be the They’re mistaking pink largest camellia collection trumpet trees for cherry in North America, thriving trees. They put on a show; in the cool microclimate at they start blooming as early Descanso Gardens, extraordinary as late February, all through varieties first cultivated March and April, and may before World War II even go into June. We have a on his own acres by “the lot of those. Our only cherry Camellia King,” horticulturist tree is [one] pink cloud Francis Miyosaku Uyematsu. flowering cherry.” And at the top of the
There’s a California lilac spring-flowering food chain — not the true syringa lilac stands our charismatic of rhapsodic song and megaflora, the ultraviolet poetry but a ceanothus. We jacaranda, which can still still have our California bloom and drop its sticky lupine and poppies, owl’s petals late into May and clover and tidy tips, but sometimes June, as you where once they bloomed, know if you have to park as Frank McDonough has your car beneath one. read, from the Altadena Ah, the breathtaking plain to San Pedro, now Jacaranda mimosifolia — there are the merest the car wash’s friend. patches, except in the high And even as you step deserts, where a rainy superbloom carefully around the season — this jacaranda’s purple petal won’t be one — births blues slick, keep telling yourself, and oranges so wide and “There’s no place like intense that you still see L.A., there’s no place like them shimmering even after L.A.”