Human Flower Project

Monday, August 15, 2005

Feral Flowers, Cultured Eyes

Carpet blooms of California wildflowers truly fly. Take a look… take off.

Adonis lupine, with coreopsis, poppies and lacy phacelia
Gorman, California, 2003
Photo:

For nineteen years, fashion photographer Richard Dickey has spent his spare time traveling the California wilderness to capture on film its “feral flowers.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” he writes, “these desert wildflower blooms are atypical and rare events.” It takes just the right timing and combinations of rainfall and temperature to set off such dazzling events, and many years may pass before the next display. “No two carpet blooms are alike,” the photographer and his pictures both affirm; in rare years, blooms are even “visible from space.”

Nearly two decades ago, Dickey “stumbled upon a vast 3-mile expanse of California Poppies that was literally so glaring it required sunglasses to look upon.” He set out to recapture that sublime experience, only to find the desert landscape ever new. Here he’s collected some 180 photographs of “ephemeral Eden.”

Thanks to Stephen Brueggerhoff of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for alerting us to this marvelous site.

The Spanish explorers called the California landscape “Tierra del Fuego”—land of fire—for the wide and searing brightness of its wildflowers. “In the late 1800’s,” Dickey writes, “miles of flowers bloomed from Glendale thru Pasadena into Monrovia, which has now become urban sprawl. Currently what little is left of ‘Tierra del Fuego’ is literally disappearing into history never to be seen again. I am sad to say the majority of the photographs shown in this portfolio were taken on land now threatened with development.”

Dickey’s magnificent website, and the LBJ Wildflower Center too, prove that while wildflowers are “feral” their very lives are bound up with housing, agriculture, politics, and art—“human projects” that variously intrude on the wild.