Looking for Wildflowers

Yesterday, on a cold and cloudy morning, I took Angel, Princess and my camera on a hike up the hill to look at the wildflowers.

I still remember the names of the Swedish wildflowers, those that were such a joy after a long, dark and cold winter. But I only know the names of a few that grow in my backyard and in the canyon.
I spent some time yesterday looking in my books and on www.enature.com, but was not very successful. But I learned about a book called The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada. It was recommended in our local paper as the best field guide for the Tehachapi Mountains. It isn't 100 percent, because we are influenced both by the San Joaquin Valley to the west and the Mojave Desert to the east. I'll check the library to see if they have it or I may buy it. This interest in finding out about things in nature is yet another thing that living here and blogging about it has done for me.

 

Angel in the midst of Goldfields - I believe that is the name of most of the flowers that cover the hillsides here.  

 Princess admiring the wildflowers (she was really just eating some tall grass she found up there).

Everywhere you looked the hills were covered in golden flowers. 

 

Angel to Princess: Let me sniff your mouth, I want to know what you were eating up there. Oh, just some grass.

This is Gwendolyn's grave. Gwendolyn was a California Desert Tortoise that Rachael rescued, but who unfortunately died a couple of years ago. She is buried here, always a lovely place, but even more so now, surrounded by wildflowers.  

  

Fiddlenecks flourish under the protective branches of a juniper tree.  

 

A fragile beauty. 

 

Curly Dock - I believe is the name of this plant. 

 

One of my favorite places is this mini-cave. Every spring I find pretty red flowers here, so we went to look for them.

  

 And we found them.

They are up there among the rocks too, so pretty against the gray. I'm glad I didn't have to climb up there though.

 

I'm ending with the Spring Gold that I began with in my blog about the old beer truck we found about a month ago. It has grown a lot since then and is now all over the lower portions of our property. I didn't see any higher up on the mountain.

Thank you for visiting!

Please let me know if you found any errors in the names I assigned to the wildflowers or know the names of the ones I didn't. It's so much fun to learn more about them!