Walking through Mission Trails Regional Park, there's an explosion of wildflowers.
It's from the deluge of storms California had this winter.
"What's blooming here? Everything. It's a great wildflower year for sure,” Park Ranger Heidi Gutknecht said. "Right now is definitely a great time to come out and see a variety of wildflowers."
The bloom came just in time for California Native Plant Week. The California Legislature, in 2010, designated the third week of April as Native Plant Week to encourage people to conserve, restore and appreciate native plants.
“There are actually an abundance of certain types of flowers this year than we've seen in previous years," Gutknecht said.
There are gooseberry, morning glory, caterpillar phacelia, popcorn flowers and more.
"You can see just surrounding me here; we have a handful of different flowers," Gutknecht said. "In front of me here, we have the bush monkey flower. And you can see the color shades can vary all the way from a light apricot orange to a bright scarlet red."
But don't call it a superbloom. There are no carpets of wildflowers as far as the eye can see like in 2019, Gutknecht said.
At the park, the wildflowers are concentrated in pockets.
“And then all on the hillsides here, you can see we have our beautiful local native California sunflower," she said. "There's also another native sunflower species we have here called San Diego sunflower.”
Gutknecht said the California sunflowers are bigger, with light yellow coloring and brown florets. The San Diego variety is smaller, with golden petals and florets. And they’re everywhere in the park.
But when people think "superbloom," they usually mean the California poppies, not the native sunflowers. Gutknecht said they're here too. You'd just have to know where to look and maybe trek a bit into the park.
"There's definitely places that you can find the poppies here in the park, as well as lupines," she said. "Those flowers kind of seem to grow near each other a lot."
Gutknecht said they are usually clustered on the hillsides; just look for the orange patches in the sea of yellow.
When you do visit the park, Gutnecht said to stay on the trails so as not to trample on the plants and also because it's rattlesnake season. Take only pictures, she said, and leave the flowers for the birds and bees.
