Where have all the flowers gone?

While cruising websites for inspiration for my next story, I happened upon some startling news! According to Mark A. Dimmit, Natural History Director at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and other desert bloom-savvy informers with Desert USA, the desert this year will look more like a bleak Mars-scape rather than a brilliantly decorated and inspiring showcase of desert wildflowers. Most of this is due to drought.

Dimmit offers forecasts for desert blooms (or the lack of) on the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum website. His outlooks date back to 1999, offering a pictorial and brief written historical log of the local desert's wildflower behavior. Here's what Dimmit's webpage shows - a rather depressing prognosis for 2007. Dimmit is quick to "break it to ya," and so wildflower enthusiasts who are emotionally unstable should take precaution...


Unfortunately, last year had the same forecast but deserts of the southwest proved to be bright and colorful in 2005 after being blessed with a wet winter. Dimmit's 2005 log features briefs and physical evidence of wildflower blooms in southern Arizona and California, and Sonora. Pictures speak louder than words and tell tales of desert delphinium and desert mariposa, which Dimmit called "two of the brightest wildflowers," in the Tucson Mountains.
Dimmit's log also reported Picacho Peak sprouting poppies, although not as many blossomed as in previous years.

Dimmit encourages other wildflower watchers to contribute to his database photos and accounts of the desert landscape in bloom. He also lists other websites, like the above-mentioned Desert USA, which lists similar predictions for a much wider area of the southwest US and northern Mexico. Sigh...keep for your pedal-pickin fingers crossed for a more colorful future.

(note to readers: all pictures on this site are from Mark Dimmit's collection as displayed on his webpage through the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum)