Mariposa Lily (Calochortus sp.) Photo: Bob Walker Collection of Oakland Museum of California

Shooting Star (Dodecatheon sp.) Photo: T. L. Steller

Armchair botanists and flower lovers are invited to greet the month of April with a visit to the Oakland Museum of California's 35th Annual California Wildflower Show, on Saturday, April 3, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday, April 4, from noon to 5 p.m. On view will be between 150 and 200 species of freshly gathered spring wildflowers, all of them native to California.

Each year's California Wildflower Show features native flowers gathered in the field, brought into the museum and sorted, identified and labeled by botanists. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday before the show, museum staff members and volunteers will travel south along the California Coast Range to gather wildflowers for this year's display. Flowers will be collected from sites on the coast and coastal mountain range from the San Francisco Bay Area south to Santa Barbara, and inland along the mountains and high desert of the Los Angeles Basin. Threatened or endangered species are not collected.

Friday, botanists from the Jepson Herbarium of the University of California, Berkeley, along with other experts, will identify the species collected. Volunteers will arrange the flowers in the museum’s Natural Sciences Gallery Side Bays, and a staff member of the University of California Botanical Garden will compose mixed wildflower bouquets for the exhibition.

" The reason for doing the show," says the museum's Chief Curator of Natural Sciences Tom Steller, "is to give people an opportunity to see up close the huge diversity of wildflowers in California. I don't believe there's any other show in the state that brings together as many native species that are nonlocal."

In order to achieve this diversity, the exhibition, which for a number of years had been held on Mother's Day weekend, now takes place at different times of the year. "There are major flower blooms from March to the end of the summer," says Steller. "To truly sample the diversity, flowers must be collected from different parts of the state at various times of the year. We try to collect when the greatest variety of flowers is in bloom in a particular area."

The collecting area for this year's exhibition, between the ocean and the west side of the Central Valley, from the northern Bay Area to Santa Barbara, includes a variety of habitats. Collectors will gather flowers from the coastal dunes, hosts to low-growing, salt-resistant plants; grasslands, which support most of the wildflowers that California is famous for, such as poppies, baby blue eyes and lupines; chaparral, home of water-conserving plants like our Lord's candle, a yucca with a stalk of creamy white flowers rising five to six feet above its nest of spiky leaves; oak woodland communities with dogwood and redbud bushes and wildflowers growing in the open spaces between the trees; and the high desert, where they may find locoweed and Joshua trees with their clusters of white-green flowers.

Text panels in the exhibition will describe flower features useful in identification as well as the characteristics of major flower families represented. California Native Plant Society volunteers will be on hand during the two-day show to answer questions. Visitors can learn about using native species in their gardens and conserving the botanical diversity that is found in the state, and can acquire information about existing threats to native wildflower populations and about organizations devoted to California’s native plants.

Magnifying glasses distributed among the tables will provide closer looks at the often complex and fascinating structures of the flowers. Microscope stations, staffed by volunteers, allow closer observation of flowers, flowers dissected to reveal their hidden parts and, occasionally, insect inhabitants of the flowers.

The Annual California Wildflower Show is organized by the Natural Sciences Department of the Oakland Museum of California in collaboration with the California Native Plant Society, which monitors the collecting; the Jepson Herbarium of the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California Botanical Garden; and the Strybing Arboretum. It is presented with the support of the East Bay Municipal Utility District, the Natural Sciences Guild and members of the Oakland Museum of California.

For press information see www.museumca.org/press/

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