Hello, and welcome. We're Nora and Hal, and we live in a small house on a gravel road outside Twentynine Palms, California, where the high desert of the Mojave starts sloping down toward the low desert of the Colorado. Hal retired from the school district in 1991 and I followed the year after, and the first spring we were both home for good we walked out into the wash below the house and found it full of yellow. Neither of us knew the names of a single thing. We have been fixing that ever since.

This page is our bloom log, our list of the flowers we see most often, our notes on when and where to look, and a few words about manners in the desert. It is not scientific. We are two retired people with a rain gauge, a hand lens, a wildflower guide held together with tape, and a spiral notebook for every spring since 1992. But we've learned a few things, and people keep asking, so here it is.

The short version, if you're planning a trip: the desert blooms in spring, usually sometime between late February and April depending on the elevation, and how much it blooms depends almost entirely on how much rain fell the previous fall and winter. Some years the whole valley floor turns gold. Some years you have to get down on your knees to find anything at all. Both kinds of year are worth the walk.

Most of the spring flowers out here are annuals: they live their whole lives in a few weeks, set seed, and die. The seeds then lie in the sand, sometimes for years, waiting. What they are waiting for is rain, and not just any rain. From what we've read and from what our own notebooks say, here is the recipe for a good year:

• Rain in the fall, ideally starting in October or November, to wake the seeds up. An early soaking rain of half an inch or more seems to be the thing that gets a big year started.
• More rain through the winter, spaced out, so the little plants don't dry up between storms. A wet December and a bone-dry January and February gives you sprouts that never make it.
• Not too cold. A hard freeze in January can set things back badly.
• Not too windy or hot too early in March, or the flowers go by in a week.

The rule of thumb the old-timers gave us is "an inch by Christmas," meaning an inch of rain in the gauge between October and the end of December. That's not a guarantee, but every good year in our log had it, and every poor year didn't.

Which brings us to El Niño. When the Pacific runs warm off South America, as it did in a big way in the winter of 1997-98, Southern California tends to get a wet winter. We got one. And the spring of 1998 was the best bloom either of us has ever seen or expects to see again; people who had lived here fifty years said the same. The following winter, 1998-99, was the opposite (a "La Niña" year, dry), and the spring of 1999 was thin. That's the desert. It doesn't do anything halfway.

The perennials, shrubs like brittlebush and ocotillo and the cacti, are steadier: they bloom most years, just more or less. Ocotillo will even put out leaves within days of a good rain at any time of year and drop them again when it dries out, which is a wonderful thing to watch from a kitchen window.

These are our own observations, from the wash below the house, the road out toward the dry lake, the pass south of town, and a few longer drives. Rain totals are from our gauge, October through March. "Peak" is our best guess at the best week; it was earlier in the low spots and later up high. Other people's notes from other places will differ, and that's fine.

Here are the ones we see most, described the way we'd describe them to a friend, not the way a botanist would. Please check a real field guide before you trust us on anything that matters.

Brittlebush. A rounded gray-green shrub, knee to waist high, covered in bright yellow daisy-like flowers held up above the leaves on long stems. Blooms on the rocky slopes and road cuts nearly every spring, wet year or dry, which is why it's the first flower everybody learns. The stems are brittle (hence the name) and ooze a resin the old-timers say was chewed like gum. We have not tried it.

Desert marigold. A low plant with woolly gray leaves and cheerful yellow flowers, about the size of a half dollar, on bare stems. Loves disturbed ground, so you'll see it along road shoulders even in poor years. Around here it will bloom off and on from spring right through fall if it gets any rain at all.

Lupine. Spikes of blue-purple pea-shaped flowers over leaves like little green hands. Comes up in the sandy flats and along the roadsides in good years, sometimes in patches so thick they look like water from a distance. Our favorite, if we had to pick.

Poppies. The California poppy is the bright orange one you've seen on postcards; the desert kind we see here is smaller and paler, more of a gold, and opens only when the sun is on it. Go out at noon, not at seven in the morning, or you'll see nothing but closed buds and think you've missed it.

Ocotillo. Not a cactus, though people think so: a bunch of long thorny gray canes, ten or fifteen feet tall, rising from one root like a bundle of whips. After rain it puts on small green leaves, and in spring each cane tips itself with a cluster of flame-red tubular flowers that the hummingbirds fight over. Blooms most years, rain or no rain, usually March into April here.

Sand verbena and dune evening primrose. These two grow together on the sandy places and dunes: the verbena is a low sprawl of purple-pink flower clusters, and the primrose is a big white four-petaled flower, opening in the evening, that turns pink as it fades. In a good year they carpet the dunes east of town, and the verbena's perfume in the evening is the thing we miss most in a dry year.

Also: desert dandelion and desert sunflower (the yellows that fill the wash), phacelia (curled clusters of blue-purple), globemallow (apricot-orange cups on a gray bush, along the highway), desert chicory (white), chuparosa (red, the hummingbirds again), and the cactus flowers: beavertail (magenta, ridiculous, wonderful) and the hedgehog and barrel cacti, later, in April and May.

After 1998 we feel we have to say this, gently.

• Stay on the trails and the roads. Those annuals you're walking through to get a better look are next year's seeds, and the sand crust you're breaking took years to form. In a big year the flowers come right to the edge of the road. You don't need to go in.
• Don't pick. Not one. Picked flowers wilt in ten minutes and everyone behind you came to see them too.
• Park off the pavement but not on the flowers. The road shoulders are where a lot of the show is.
• Carry water, even in March, even for a short walk. Wear a hat. The sun here is not the sun you're used to.
• Watch where you put your hands and feet. Rattlesnakes wake up in the spring too. They want nothing to do with you; give them the same courtesy.
• Close the gates you open and leave nothing behind but footprints, and not too many of those.
• Bring a hand lens. Half the flowers out here are the size of a pencil eraser ("belly flowers," people call them, because of how you have to look at them). They are every bit as pretty as the big ones, and nobody else is looking.

It's the last week of September as I write this, and the fall rain watch begins. Here's how we do it: the gauge is on a post by the clothesline, Hal reads it every morning there's been anything in it, and the total goes on a sheet on the refrigerator with the date. We're hoping for that first good soaking in October. If we get an inch by Christmas, we'll start telling people to make plans. If we don't, we'll tell you that, too.

We'll update this section after every rain, and starting in February we'll post what we're seeing on our walks, so you can decide whether it's worth the drive. Our honest advice, for anyone reading this in the fall: don't book a motel for the third weekend of March on the strength of a magazine article. Check the rain. Then check with somebody who lives here. We're happy to be that somebody; write us.