Clearly, there’s no shortage of flowers in Southern California. As I write this near the end of 2024, roses, iris and California fuchsia are still blooming in my Ventura garden, and hummingbirds are darting among tall orange whorls of lion’s tail (Leonotis leonurus) and fat magenta stalks of hummingbird sage.
That’s likely why it’s easy to take our blooms for granted in SoCal. So this year, let me help you make a plan. I’ve compiled a list of 12 lovely buds and their optimum bloom times in Southern California.
Please note, this is a limited and highly subjective list not intended to encompass the vast number of spectacular flowers in our region. Also note that these listed bloom times are meant as guides, not absolutes, so before you plan an outing, always check ahead to ensure your favorites are actually in flower.
For floral joy throughout the year, set reminders now to take some time in the coming months to literally stop and smell the roses … or lilacs.
January: Camellias
Camellia shrubs, with their glossy dark green leaves, soared in popularity in the mid-1900s, which is why they’re ubiquitous in established SoCal landscapes, and the leaves of some varieties — Camellia sinensis, for instance — give us black tea. But it’s the flowers, with their variety of shapes, colors and fragrance, that really inspire anyone with an eye for beauty.
One of the world’s premier collections is at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge. Descanso’s extraordinary camellia forest was created by former Los Angeles Daily News publisher and camellia collector E. Manchester Boddy under unhappy circumstances. According to the history on Descanso’s website, Boddy amassed many exquisite varieties from at least three Japanese American nurseries whose camellia breeding owners were forced to sell their inventory at a fraction of its value before they were incarcerated during World War II because of their Japanese heritage.
The legacy of camellia growers such as F.M. Uyematsu lives on at the gardens, but Southern California still has one other internationally famous nursery devoted to camellias and azaleas in Altadena. Nuccio’s Nurseries offers more than 500 varieties of camellias, many created by cross-pollinating bees and then nurtured by the owners. Visit in January and February to delight in the many choices, and take one home — they grow in pots too. And visit this year, because family members are trying to sell the property, so this opportunity won’t last forever.
February: Bulbs (daffodils, tulips, etc.)
Bulbs are defiant harbingers of spring in colder climes, sometimes pushing up through the snow in their zeal to greet the sun and spread a little color on a bleak landscape of slushy grays. We don’t face that problem much in SoCal, of course, but our last two winters were so damp and gray that I nearly wept with joy last February when the first daffodils burst forth in my soggy garden.
Twin Peaks, a tiny town near Lake Arrowhead, has planted thousands of daffodil bulbs as part of the Julie Greer Daffodil Project. Greer, a resident of Twin Peaks’ Strawberry Flat neighborhood, loved daffodils and began planting hundreds of the bulbs around her community in 1999 with the help of her husband, Tom, and close friend Julie Hale. After Greer died from breast cancer in 2001, residents planted thousands more bulbs in her honor in their yards and along State Highway 189, creating a beautiful spring display.
Tulips usually start blooming a few weeks later in SoCal. Several botanic gardens, such as South Coast Botanic Gardens in Rolling Hills Estates and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, have tulip and bulb gardens — the Huntington plants them in its famous rose garden to create filler color after the roses are pruned. But for an awe-inspring display, visit Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, which plants 30,000 tulip bulbs every January for early spring blooms. (This is weather-dependent — check out the handy “What’s in Bloom” guide for more information.)
March: California poppies and wildflowers
Fields full of wildflowers are breathtaking. They seem to create a kind of joyful delirium, which is why every spring experts get the same exasperating question: Will there be a superbloom? The query is especially important to SoCal residents, as we live relatively close to big bloom areas like Walker Canyon in Lake Elsinore, Carrizo Plain National Monument near Santa Margarita and numerous state parks such as Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Chino Hills State Park.
Please note that “superblooms,” when hillsides are blanketed with color like bright quilts lying against the ground, are relatively rare. But we usually get some lovely wildflower displays every year, easy to spot on hikes in the desert or nearby mountains, or even along the hills that line our freeways. Rule of thumb: Wildflower blooms are triggered by warming temperatures, so desert areas will see blooms earlier than higher elevations. Check the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wild Flower Hotline, which provides updates every Friday about the best viewing spots for wildflowers from March through June. Note: It’s always a bad idea to park your car on a freeway shoulder so you can dash up a hill and trample some wildflowers in your quest for a colorful selfie. Admire carefully, without destroying or picking.
April: Roses
Almost every SoCal botanic garden worth its salt has some space devoted to the genus Rosa, along with a few public parks and ranchos, such as Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum in Rancho Dominguez, Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach and Exposition Park in South L.A. But probably the most extraordinary is the rose garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Lucky for us, Arabella Huntington loved roses, because the botanic garden she and her husband left behind features more than 1,300 varieties, tended by famed rose breeder Tom Carruth, who left his job creating new rose varieties at Weeks Roses to become the Huntington’s rose garden curator.
Roses are tougher than you’d think — during the drought I spied many residential yards with dead lawns and an old rose bush still valiantly blooming despite neglect and lack of water. April is the month most varieties enter full bloom, but these plants like Southern California, so expect to see roses blooming well into late fall.
May: Lilacs
I see your eyebrows arching … lilacs? In Southern California? Well, yes, and I don’t just mean the native ceanothus shrubs, a.k.a. California lilacs, that start coloring (and perfuming) our wild hills and many native habitat gardens as early as March. Varieties such as Joyce Coulter (Ceanothus ‘Joyce Coulter’) look very much like the traditional lilacs (i.e., Syringa vulgaris) that require freezing winter temperatures to profusely bloom.
Descanso Gardens has developed heat-tolerant hybrids for its garden, and there’s also a low-chill variety known as Beach Party. Or you can grow them in mountain areas, such as Idyllwild, where Gary Parton, a retired college art teacher, has nurtured 165 varieties in his Idyllwild Lilac Gardens.
For 20 years, Parton has opened his lilac garden to the public for free every spring, but 2025 will be the last time. You can visit every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from the last weekend of April through May from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. After that, Parton, 86, is putting his home and near acre of land up for sale to move to warmer climes.
June: Lavender
What is it about lavender that makes people want to don gauzy clothes and wander the fields, fingers trailing through the fragrant flowers? (There must be a Hallmark movie in here somewhere.) These Mediterranean native flowers have a scent that keeps giving, even if you strip all the little buds off the upright stalks and put them in a container.
Southern California has several lavender fields near L.A. to satisfy your day-trip, lavender-field cravings. If you do an online search for “lavender farms Southern California,” you’ll get a good-sized list for farms north of Los Angeles, such as Frog Creek Farm in Ojai, Foxen Canyon Farms in Solvang, Lavender Fields Forever in Buellton and Clairmont Farms in Los Olivos. To the east, you’ll find 123 Farm in Cherry Valley, the Fork & Plow Lavender Farm in Aguanga (19 miles east of Temecula) and Ross Lake Lavender Farm in Fallbrook.
July: Sunflowers
If you have even a scrap of sunny ground for planting, definitely push a sunflower seed into the ground this winter and stand back — it’s not exactly like Jack and the Beanstalk, but the way sunflowers grow is truly miraculous. In just a few months, that little seed can grow twice as tall as the average American male (5-foot-9), with a stalk as thick as his arm and flowers far bigger than a human head.
Sunflowers come in all sizes, shapes and colors, from gigantic to knee-highs designed to fill a vase with happy flowers. We even have the California native sunflower (Helianthus annuus) decorating our wild hills, an annual reseeder that Bruce Schwartz of the L.A. Native Plant Source calls “a living bird feeder” because of the safe perches and food the plant provides.
A few farms in Southern California grow fields of sunflowers for wandering and picking, with flowers blooming from summer into fall, including Tanaka Farms’ Hana Field in Costa Mesa, the Pumpkin Station in Rancho Bernardo (near Escondido — call ahead to see when flowers are ready for picking) and Carlsbad Strawberry Co. in Carlsbad, which typically has a sunflower maze for photos (no picking) in the fall.
August: California buckwheat
Come midsummer, it’s easy to spot native California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) shrubs growing in the wild areas of central and Southern California, especially in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. The large spreading shrubs are covered with flowers that grow in thick bunches, like cream-colored bouquets dotted with pink in the spring. Late in the year, the flowers turn a handsome copper color, but in August, they are mid-change, so from a distance, the shrubs look speckled with cream and rust.
Up close, you immediately understand why these shrubs are considered a keystone species — one of SoCal’s most important habitat plants — because the flowers are alive with bees, butterflies and a multitude of other nectar-loving bugs, not to mention the birds who happily dine at this insect buffet.
You can see buckwheats at the California Botanic Garden in Claremont, the state’s largest garden devoted to California native plants, as well as at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley and Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano.
September: Crape myrtle
Hear that rumbling? That’s the sound of shade tree advocates unhappy that I’m mentioning crape myrtles in this list. But my mom loved these showy trees with the colorful crepe-papery flowers, as did my grandmother, and about a billion-jillion other SoCal residents who have planted them in yards, around businesses and along many city streets. These trees are a triple threat, said Los Angeles County Arboretum arborist Frank McDonough: beautiful bloomers in late summer with clouds of frilly flowers in purples, pinks, fuchsia and white; dramatic red and gold leaves in the fall; and sculptural bark that makes the bare tree lovely in winter.
So why the grumbling? Crape myrtles are so popular they’ve become the prominent trees in some cities, which means those cities could lose much of their urban forest if the trees were attacked by a disease or insect. And while crape myrtles are lovely to behold and require little water once they’re established, they don’t provide much in the way of shade, a problem when you’re trying to reduce urban heat levels.
Despite these concerns, these eastern Asian natives are still lovely when they’re blooming in the late summer and early fall, and unlike the much loved and much despised jacaranda, their magnificent flowers don’t leave a slippery purple mess on cars and sidewalks. The Arboretum has one of the largest collections outside of city streets, McDonough said, but you can also see them at the San Diego Zoo, Descanso Gardens and the Japanese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. But for the sake of diversity and our increasing need for shade, consider planting something else around your business or home.
October: Chrysanthemums
Come October, it’s impossible to walk into a supermarket or hardware store without seeing an army of potted chrysanthemums in many sizes and colors. But those retail displays, mostly meant for decorating front porches and patios, are just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the country’s premier chrysanthemum growers, Sunnyslope Gardens, operated in San Gabriel for some 70 years, but the nursery closed more than a decade ago. Now ardent chrysanthemum growers in Southern California trade with each other, said George MacDonald, outgoing president of the San Gabriel Valley Chrysanthemum Society, or buy online from King’s Mums in Oklahoma, which offers 130 cultivars as well as publications for people who want to grow their own.
The Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden at California State University Long Beach hosts a Chrysanthemum Festival (scheduled for Nov. 8 in 2025), but probably the best way to see this flower’s many faces is at the two annual shows sponsored by the San Gabriel Valley Chrysanthemum Society, usually the first weekend of November at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia, and the Orange County Chrysanthemum Society, usually the last weekend in October, at Sherman Library & Gardens at Corona del Mar.
November: Poinsettias
By November, poinsettias start crowding mums out of retail displays, and yes, I know the plant’s showy red “petals” aren’t actually flowers but leaves — the plant’s flowers are actually the small yellow centers — and these days, cultivars come in many other colors, including cream, pink, white, pale green, orange and speckled.
It was SoCal nurseryman Paul Ecke Sr. who took a little-known, spindly outdoor plant from Central America in the early 1920s and bred it into a hardy potted plant “whose tapering red leaves have been synonymous with the Yuletide season for more than 70 years,” according to his obituary in 1991. Ecke started growing and selling his poinsettias in a field on Sunset Boulevard but moved to Encinitas around 1923, where Ecke Ranch became the largest poinsettia producer in the world.
The family business was sold in 2012, and the company’s poinsettias are primarily grown in Guatemala now. But it’s still possible to see greenhouses filled with poinsettias in Encinitas. Weidner’s Gardens, a locally owned, 50-year-old nursery, grows 30 varieties, according to co-owner Kalim Owens, and offers free tours of the greenhouses every year at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on the Friday and Saturday before Thanksgiving.
December: Toyon berries
OK, toyon berries are not flowers, but they are so bright and festive, and native to Southern California, so they seemed a fitting end to this floral calendar. This time of year, you can see these tall, bushy shrubs covered with berries throughout Southern California, from the native plant trail at Rio de Los Angeles State Park in Glassell Park to Walnut Canyon Road leading to the Oak Canyon Nature Center in Anaheim Hills, to Griffith Park and many of the other wild areas that frame our SoCal cities.
Or, visit the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which has a grove of about 25 tall toyon in its native plant garden. This time of year, its toyon are ablaze with berries, until they’re picked clean by hungry birds, reports museum educator Lila Higgins in a delightful article titled “California Holly: How Hollywood Didn’t Get its Name,” in which she debunks the romantic and oft-repeated myth that Hollywood got its name from the toyon plant, which resembles English holly.
Instead, Higgins writes, the name came from Daeida Wilcox, wife of Harvey Henderson Wilcox, a rich businessman from Kansas who, in 1886, bought 120 acres of fig and apricot groves near Cahuenga Pass for about $18,000 and discovered he could make good money subdividing the land and selling lots for $1,000 each. Initially it was called the Wilcox subdivision, until Daeida met a wealthy traveler on a train “who owned a fine estate in Illinois” named Hollywood. Daeida so loved the name that on Feb. 1, 1887, her husband filed a subdivision map in the Los Angeles County Recorder’s office with the name “Hollywood.” And thus, a star was born, thanks to a chance encounter on a train, which is a pretty romantic Hollywood ending in itself.
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