These photos have been on my camera for a couple months now. Since I woke up before 6:00 a.m. and am not riding until 9:30 there is plenty of time to fiddle with digital pictures. We took this hike in late March when the wildflowers were at their peak. This park is owned by the City of Malibu. Click each picture to enlarge.
This is a meadow against a hillside of native coastal sage. The meadow is mostly exotic grasses but it has a good mix of plants, instead of a monoculture of a single type of grass, such as brome grass you see in most grasslands in SoCal. This area used to be a ranch long before it was shi-shi Malibu. The plant communities are not only shaped by fire but by historical grazing as well.
I can’t resist taking pictures of poppies, even though the poppy bloom in my backyard was better than what you see in this photo. I like the mixture of roxks and plants. Most of these plants are native.
Purple flowers, probably purple nightshade (Solanum xanti), according to my field guide by Milt McAuley.
More purple flowers, but I can’t remember what these are.
This is a pretty mix of flowers. The yellow flowers are the ubiquitous sticky monkey flowers that cover the hillsides in the spring.
These flowers are probably mostly gone by now as summer is bearing down upon us, though late this year, thank goodness. The temps have been over 90F for the last few days. We haven’t turned on the a/c yet as we like to make sure we’re good and miserable before we resort to artificially cooled air. Plus I hate to admit that I’m stuck indoors because it’s too hot outside. Hopefully we’ll get some June gloom before summer gets really serious.