We love seeing the cycle of flower blooms as they appear and then fade on live, in-ground plants.
Native plants’ flower blooms are integral to the landscape and the life here. It’s a lot of fun to watch the honey bees, native bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies interact with the flowers here. They get excited about flowers!
Our native landscape installations help honey bees and other pollinators have high quality, year-round food. Some native plants bloom during the dry time, a dearth-of-flowers time in general; this is when bee health is threatened by poor food choices. In this way we are doing our small part to stave off honey bee extinction.
We have some non-native flowering plants here as well, especially rose bushes inherited from the previous owner, and lavendar we’ve planted for ourselves and our insect friends to enjoy. Sometimes, we dry the lavendar and put sachets in our clothing drawers.
Often, our citrus trees twice in a year. The lime, Meyer lemon, mandarin orange, navel orange, and kumquat blossoms give out intensely delicious scents!
Spring begins here in earnest when flowers appear on the almond trees, usually the first week or two in January. Spring’s profusion of flowers is an almost-psychedelic, hypnotic time. When the drier weather sets in during April-May, we still have blooms, but, it’s not as intense as in the cool, wet, dark time of year when the light begins returning.
We’ve outlined in the pages below what flowers are likely to be blooming here in any given month. Imagine that you are a pollinator, hungry for good nutrition. These lists show you what’s for dinner at our place at any given time.