RAINBOW OF WILDFLOWERS A ONCE-A-DECADE SHOW.

Byline: JANE GATES Gardening

SANTA CLARITA - It looks like spring is finally here.

We have certainly been treated to an abundance of flowers due to the wonderful rainfall. We can water all we want, but our treated water filled with heavy minerals just can't equal the aerated rain sent from the skies when it comes to making plants grow happily.

So make sure you take a little time from your gardening work to wander the open lands and check out the wildflower show nature has offered this year. With the extended rain at both ends of this season and the seeds that didn't germinate last year, we have a bounty of flowers blooming that we may not see again for many years to come.

Even our own gardens are luxuriating in the long, gentle growing season. Take time to cut a few flowers to bring indoors. And maybe this year, the rabbits will find enough food from the wild plants to let US gardeners start our edibles and young plants with less interference than we had last year.

Although I usually do focus on the cultivated garden, I am going to digress to the wildflowers this week as it may be decades before so many different wildflowers will again put on this kind of a display in your back yard, that of a neighbor, or in a field nearby.

The roadsides are filled with low-growing blue lupines and the familiar California poppies. And the hillsides are bright with the chartreuse of mustards and sunny yellow of bushy rabbitbrush. The big bushes that bloom with drooping white panicles on the hillsides are called chamise and are highly flammable. The tall candles with huge white plumes are yuccas. And the sprawling orange patches that crawl like nets over other plants are parasitic plants called dotter.

But if you wander into the hillsides, you'll find some less common treasures. There are fields of magical little white flowers curling in on themselves that are known as white forget-me-nots, and light-blue popcorn balls called globe gilia.

Blazing yellow daisies cover whole slopes in color with flowers known as goldfields, and if you look closely, you'll find chia sage growing in curious spheres stuck one on top of the next, studded with tiny dark blue flowers.

We even have a native beavertail cactus blooming in brilliant carmine pink - look but don't touch. The 3-foot-tall black salvia bush is blooming in pale blue spikes, and all over the hills, soft purple cat-faced flowers cover 12-inch phacelia plants.

Tall indigo lollypop flowers nod on the blue dicks (bulbs). And other lupines in purples, reds and blues pepper fields of gold fiddlenecks. These are just some of the flowers in bloom right now here in the Santa Clarita area.

You can go to the poppy fields or wander into Placerita Canyon Park. Or you can check out an area around your neighborhood. The flowers are everywhere. Nature is offering us a garden tour of her own right now so we gardeners can see how the expert does it.