Four-Decade Archive of California’s Native Plants – Superblooms
For more than four decades, photographer Richard Dickey has documented California’s native plants and its most elusive wildflower landscapes—fleeting moments when the right mix of rain, temperature, and sunlight transforms entire hillsides into bursts of color. Long before the term “super bloom” entered popular culture, these extraordinary events were known among a small circle of naturalists and photographers as carpet blooms. These photographs preserve transient moments in nature—glimpses of an ecological world that may never be repeated.
Taken together, this archive represents the earliest long-term photographic record of California’s large-scale wildflower “carpet blooms” — ecological events that decades later became widely known as Super Blooms.
Photographed primarily with high-resolution Fuji GX617 panoramic and 35 mm cameras, this long-term body of work records fleeting moments when the desert transforms into a living tapestry of color. Hills, valleys, and fault-lined basins erupt in flowers so dense they redefine the landscape itself — events that may appear only once in a generation.
These blooms are born from an extreme land shaped by drought, episodic rains, shifting climates, and deep ecological time. Seeds lie dormant for decades, awaiting precise conditions. When they emerge, they create a phenomenon both fragile and overwhelming — a force of nature that feels as much physical as visual. As witnessed below.
Storm and Super Bloom
Ecologic – Historic Context
California’s native plants are part of the California Floristic Province—one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots—where an extraordinary concentration of endemic species has evolved through cycles of scarcity and abundance, relying on dormancy and sudden, explosive growth to survive an unpredictable climate. This biodiversity hotspot is a zone of Mediterranean-type climate and is characterized by hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. The province encompasses a wide range of habitats, from coastal sage scrub and oak woodlands to alpine peaks and desert margins. Across these varied environments, more than 3,000 vascular plant species have been recorded, with roughly 60 percent found nowhere else on Earth. This high level of endemism reflects a long history of isolation, adaptation, and ecological specialization.
Early Spanish explorers described California as la tierra del fuego — a land seemingly set ablaze by fields of brilliant orange flowers stretching to the horizon. Nineteenth-century settlers wrote of immense wildflower pastures from San Francisco to San Diego, and communities celebrated spring with festivals honoring this natural heritage. Most importantly, Native Americans revered and cherished the land’s floral rebirth after winter, utilizing California’s native plants for food, medicine, clothing, and building materials.
Among the California Floristic Province, vast wildflower blooms are the most unpredictable—governed by a delicate interplay of water, soil, sunlight, temperature, insects, grazing herbivores, fire and the passage of time. When they occur, these spectacular bursts of abundance nourishes the surrounding ecosystem.
Disappearing Landscapes
Many of the locations documented here are increasingly threatened by development, invasive species, agriculture, and climate pressures. Areas once famous for vast wildflower displays — including regions now absorbed by urban expansion — exist today only in memory and photographs.
This work stands as both celebration and record: a visual chronicle of landscapes that are changing, and in some cases, quietly disappearing.
Experience of Bloom
To witness a major bloom is to feel immersed in color, fragrance, light, and motion. Flowers open and close with the sun, ephemeral species appear at dusk and vanish by morning, and entire hillsides shift in tone as the day unfolds.Through these photographs, the intention is to offer viewers a sense of presence — an invitation to witness a rare convergence of time, climate, and living systems.
Feral Flowers is a 40-year photographic archive dedicated to preserving landscapes once in bloom—many irreversibly altered by development and land use—ensuring their presence endures in memory and record.
Feral Flowers Project Reimagined
The term FERAL is taken from the old Latin meaning “of the wild” or “from the wild” and is a separate translation closely related to “once domesticated and returned to the wild“, which is more contemporary.
This project began in 1986 and has grown organically over decades — rooted in observation, persistence, and transformation. The current redesign brings forward archival materials, field notes, photographic records, and new reflections that have not previously been gathered in one place.
Among these materials are long-term documentations of the Hills of Gorman, California — once considered the crown jewel of California’s recurring Superblooms. Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, the hills burst into wildflower displays every three to five years, reaching their peak with California’s largest and most diverse super bloom in 2003. A 2800 acre wildflower preserve was even proposed by UCLA Extension. Then, the bloom cycles gradually ceased. And now they’re gone.
What happened? The answer holds a few intriguing insights — including an unexpected connection to a prominent grocery store chain. The expanded archive quietly explores this question and others.
When this work began in the mid-1980s, very few people were documenting California’s large-scale wildflower blooms. Today these spectacular events — widely shared across social media — are commonly called super blooms. What began as a personal effort to understand when and where these rare landscapes appeared gradually became a long-term visual record of some of California’s most extraordinary and ephemeral natural events.
As the site evolves in the coming weeks and months, additional material will be released in phases. Thank you for your patience as this decades-long body of work is brought back into bloom.
Next – SUPER BLOOM