Mid-Winter Flowers
—that Should Be Early Spring Flowers
We have at least 11 species of wildflowers blooming in our yard right now: Bladderpod, Brittlebush, Fairy Duster, Globe Mallow, London Rocket (an invasive weed so we nipped that in the bud, literally), Lupine, Mexican Poppy, Odora, Penstemon, Ruellia, and a tiny (2 mm) white unidentified flower.
It’s pretty normal for us to see wildflowers blooming in late February (which is “early Spring” for Tucson), but this season we’ve seen flowers as early as December. I’ve kept a spreadsheet since 2009 tracking the first day each year that almost 60 plants in our yard bloom. Our Mexican Poppies this year started blooming 12 days earlier than the earliest previous first bloom date! We attribute this to the frequent rain, and above average amount of rain, we received in September-December 2025 as well as warmer-than-normal temperatures.
Here’s one of our Mexican Poppy flowers and a flower bud, illustrated in my Perpetual Journal.
Your Science Word of the Day
Speaking of Poppies, your science word of the day is:
calyptra (pronounced kuh-lip-truh)
A calyptra is a hood or cap covering a flower. Calyptras pop off the flowers when the flowers expand and start to bloom. Poppies have calyptras, which look like gnome hats to me! Here’s a photo I took of a Mexican Poppy bud, complete with gnome hat calyptra!
Less than two weeks later, our Lupine started to bloom—so here’s one in my Perpetual Journal.
As I was looking down on one of our Lupine plants, I noticed something really interesting: the flowers, which are in groups of three, form the points of an equilateral triangle, and each layer of flowers alternates in position by 60°. Meaning: the three flowers in the top layer are positioned at, say, 0°, 120°, and 240°, while the flowers in the next layer (beneath the top layer) are positioned at 60°, 180°, and 300°. Each flower in the second layer of flowers is positioned exactly between two of the flowers above it. Neato!
You can see that in this view looking straight down at a Lupine in bloom.
"There are always flowers for those who want to see them."
- Henri Matisse
Thank you for being here! I appreciate it. See you next week!
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I'm so sorry the blooms are happening earlier due to our heating planet. I'm NOT sorry to learn of their abundance from rains, their beauty captured here in art and photography. Lovely!