I have never had to buy those flowers again. The poppy seeds flew in the Santa Ana winds of summer and fall. Yellow finches hung upside down in the 6-foot sunflowers, scattering the seeds. The beds around our house turned glorious. We mapped out seven spots where you can go see it over the next month. Photos from across Southern California show the beginning of a superbloom. Children love seed packets - by the handful, mine added larkspur, love-in-a-mist and Italian sunflowers in all colors - white, orange, yellow, red.Ĭalifornia California’s breathtaking superbloom is here. I planted one six-pack of red Flanders poppies inside the fence my husband built along the sidewalk. She was appalled at the system my girls and I developed. My mother is Swiss, a tidy perfectionist who planted annuals and vegetables in rows and never ever let things go to seed. I kept the tree and roses alive, with my mother’s insistent help. Near the house, one ancient apricot tree, hardy mock orange hedges and 10 roses still bloomed. And nothing but dirt around the hitching post. There was still a hitching post in the parking strip. In 1988, when we got the house, the owner was 95, a widower. I washed their small hands in the ancient cast-iron farmhouse sink in my kitchen, just as the people who lived here back in 1910, when the house was built, washed theirs. My own three daughters are grown now, living in other places, but they helped me weed when they were small. It grows in a working-class Riverside neighborhood, the flowers leaning over the curb into the bike lane of a wide avenue, nodding in the wake of big pickups and contractor vans, lowriders and Harleys, and parents squiring kids in minivans. Mine is a California garden, with native golden poppies and wild filaree mixed in with the love-in-a-mist and tall larkspur. My letter carrier pauses, takes a daily picture of the scarlet Mister Lincoln and silvery-pink Our Lady of Guadalupe roses - a great combination in name and color - and texts people: Stop and smell the roses! Sometimes elderly people cry, telling me they haven’t seen sunflowers like that since Kansas. Teen boys pick bouquets for their dates, children poke their fingers into the vivid black crosses inside the red Flanders poppies standing taller than they do. It’s a superbloom for my community.Īll day and night, people immerse themselves in the parking strip in front of my house - 110 feet long and 6 feet wide. Mine is not a private garden, like those of English aristocrats or wealthy Americans, hidden behind tall gates and hedges.
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