As the state is swept by a super bloom, these flowers are popping up – a silver lining for areas hit hard by intense fires

When wildfires swept through southern California last year they left a trail of destruction: leveling houses, historic Hollywood sets and sites of biodiversity. Now a rare flower is proving that great destruction can give rise to something spectacular.

Park ranger Ana Beatriz Cholo has been on a mission to find fire poppies – a rare and elusive species that only grows on the heels of major fires – in the Santa Monica Mountains, which were especially hard hit. She knew they were unusual, and that the 2018 Woolsey fire, which scorched more than 96,000 acres, made this a good year to hunt.

Cholo got lucky: on a mountain trail this week she discovered the flowers, which are also known as Papaver californicum and come in orange, red and brick red. For an area struggling to recover from fire damage even as other parts of California are swept by a phenomenal super bloom, these inflorescences are a rare, and literal, bright spot.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The poppy is known as a ‘fire follower’. Photograph: Courtesy of the National Park Service

The fire poppy belongs to a group of plants known as fire followers: those that use the heat, smoke or charred soil as signals to sprout. Their seeds lie dormant for years, explains Marti Witter, a wildfire ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains national recreation area. Then when the fire hits, it sends a message to begin germination. For fire poppies, the signal comes from smoke. For other fire followers, the heat of a blaze can crack open the hard coating on a seed. “This year, the combination of fire and rain has created good conditions for lots of fire followers,” she says.

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Fire can clear out shrubs that suck up nutrients and water, which allow new types of flora to grow. Shrubs also create a dense canopy, which prevents new plants from poking up.

When shrubs are gone, annual flowers like the fire poppy also play an important role. They provide vegetative cover that helps to reduce erosion on steep slopes after the protective cover has been burnt off. When rains hit after fires, hillsides can slide, resulting in damage and deaths, as happened in Montecito in January 2018.

Fire poppies on a trail in the Santa Monica mountains. Photograph: Courtesy of the National Park Service

California plants are used to intense but infrequent fires – they occur typically every 30-150 years in the Mediterranean coastal shrub ecosystem, or chaparral, of southern California. The past few decades, though, have brought more frequent fires, which make it difficult for the native shrubs to return, Witter says. Some hillsides have been converted to non-native species like mustard grass.

Fire poppies are fleeting: after waiting for the exact conditions to sprout, they may only bloom for a day or two. They could return next year or the year after, until the shrubs come back. After that, they will have to wait for the next blaze.