Part of what I love about wildflowers is their unpredictability. Just when you think you know what should be in bloom where and when, the temperature or rainfall or combination of the two intervenes. Flowers bloom early, flowers bloom late, flowers barely show, blooms overlap. A rare plant will bloom on a road cut bank and you'll not see it again for ten years.
UC Digital Library photos and information on flowers and more
Monday, April 30
I drove down Highway 88 from Pine Grove to Jackson today and returned home up Shake Ridge Ridge. Have to say this is an excellent year for lupine, in spite of (because of?) the dry winter. The patches of common lupine -- I don't know the species -- are abundant and expansive. The yerba santa is blooming early on the S-curves outside Sutter Creek.
At home today . . . 
- Four kinds of monkeyflowers
- Wilding pinks (petrorhagia dubia)
- Douglas meadowfoam
- Some clover, a few lupine, wildland stars
- Purple milkweed
- Lots of vetch
The Indian soap plant should bloom before long.
Monday, April 23, Shake Ridge Road east of Oneto Road and west of New Chicago - Quartz Mountain Road: 
Indian pinks (silene) -- red ones, pink ones -- on the banks on the south side of the road. Pink flowers are pinks... red flowers are pinks ... I even saw a white pink the other day. Go figure. . .
April 21, on our property near Daffodil Hill
- A few lingering shooting stars
- Purple milkweed in bud
- Douglas meadowfoam in bud
- Yellow monkeyflowers
- Gold fields are fading
- Native clover
- Yellow violets
- Wild ginger (shown at right)
- White California lilac/deer brush (ceanothus)
- Woodland stars
April 20, "old" Hwy 49 btwn Amador City and Sutter Creek 
- Chinese houses (shown at right)
- Fiddleneck
April 15, PG&E Road below Tiger Creek Afterbay
- Globe lilies (shown at right)
- Various lupines
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