We visited the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden with a couple of new friends on March 29th. We hadn't enjoyed this special place since we had lived in the Santa Barbara area many years previously.
Blooming Black Sage near the entrance
The meadow area
Turtle sunning on a rock
Lovely blue Ceanothus blossoms
Hummingbird Sage
Chocolate Iris
A couple of unidentified plants
One of our favorite locations for spring wildflowers is on Figueroa
Mountain in the San Rafael Mountains of California. Since we had been in
this part of California much later than originally planned because of
COVID-19, we decided to check this year's crop before leaving the area.
It had been a pretty dry winter, so we were not expecting too much, but wanted
to see what might be blooming. The flowers turned out to be pretty sparse, but we did manage to find a few of the types commonly found.
We started our loop drive by driving out on Happy Canyon Road. As we
started climbing, we saw these Prickly Phlox.
Common in the chaparral of the foothills and lower mountains elevations are varieties of Ceanothus shrubs, many of which were blooming with many dense clusters of tiny off-white flowers.
We had been seeing small patches of California Poppies along the roads.
But the large dense fields of poppies found in some past years were very sparse this year and somewhat lost in the browning vegetation of this dry year.
These poppies blooming among cactus seemed symbolic of
the drought.
Bigelow's Coreopsis
Fiesta Flower
Chaparral Clematis
Interesting geology exposed in the road cut
Bush Poppy
Indian Paintbrush
There were lots of Bush Lupine plants, but very few had any blooms.
Phacelia
Shooting Stars
The view across the Santa Ynez Valley with Cachuma Lake and the Santa Ynez Mountains forming the other side. Santa Cruz Island in the Santa Barbara Channel is barely visible in the far distance.
Another view with San Miguel Island in the distance
Buttercups
Wallflower
Red Maids
One area that is often carpeted with Goldfields only had a very few.
We had almost given up finding any Johnny Jump-ups (wild pansy) when we found a patch near the bottom of the mountain.
Fiddleneck
While the first part of 2021 did not provide many photo opportunities, here are a few things to share.
Near San Marcos Pass above Santa Barbara is a small cave famous for Chumash Native American pictographs. In a previous work life, Barbara led groups
for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History to visit this site. It
had been many years since either of us had visited.
Because of graffiti and vandalism, a heavy metal fence and gate has long
existed to protect the cave.
Pictographs inside the cave.
We spent a week at the Vines RV Resort in Paso Robles, California. The resort had recently begun the construction of a large solar power installation when we arrived.
One of the pieces of equipment used for the solar project was this
large, tracked hole drilling machine.
A great sunset at the resort
