EDITOR'S LETTER

Walter Olafsson was unpredictable. On a good day, he might offer you a piece of Bazooka. Or maybe even a Twinkie. The next day he'd throw you in a snowbank or charge you a toll to get out the door. He kept everyone on the playground guessing. Mother Nature messes with us in a similar way. Especially in March, with the spring bloom. Like my old schoolmate — and bull sharks and earthquakes and Geminis — the erratic nature of wildflowers is almost impossible to predict.

There's a reason for that: No one knows for sure what needs to happen in the months leading up to March, and there's a long list of cagey variables that can undermine hypotheses. What we do know is that the spring-blooming annuals — Mexican goldpoppies, lupines, owl's clover and more — need to germinate in the early fall. “This is crucial,” says Mark Dimmitt, the former director of natural history at the ArizonaSonora Desert Museum. “The ‘critical window’ is probably between late September and early December, but that differs with different species.” Rainfall is another necessity. “A ‘triggering rain’ of at least 1 inch must occur during the autumn window,” Dimmitt says. “The earlier the better after the summer heat has waned.” Rainfall at the wrong time doesn't do much to help germinate the flamboyant annuals — perennials are less finicky.

After that triggering rain, the desert needs to go on a bender, chugging about an inch of water every month until March. Still, there are no guarantees. As it goes, we get a spectacular bloom about once every 10 years. And in the off years, we head to those places that tend to perform pretty well regardless of Mother Nature's capricious plan, including Picacho Peak, the foothills of the Superstition Mountains and the Tohono O'odham Nation. We go because we have to.

In New England, spring is marked by the flowing sap of silver maples, the sounds of western chorus frogs and the human release from hibernation. Here, it's the wildflowers. And that rare splash of color on a palette of earth tones — desert ecologists have documented 20 different kinds of wildflowers growing together in a single square yard.

It's difficult, sometimes, for the uninitiated to comprehend the beauty of our Sonoran Desert, even in the spring. Their adjectives can be unflattering. Like someone describing a slice of burnt Wonder bread. Thoreau said it's not what you look at that matters, but what you see. We see it all the time. Those of us who wander the desert. And make magazines about it. Our friends at Desert Botanical Garden see it, too. They've been studying the Sonoran Desert since 1939.

Before I sat down to write these words, I looked back at our March 1947 issue. I do that sometimes — go back exactly 75 years. In that old issue is our first-ever story about DBG. “You can walk across its length or breadth in five minutes,” Jerry McClain wrote, “but if you pause to inspect its flowers on any warm spring day, you'll be in the Desert Botanical Garden of Arizona for hours. It spreads over only 306 acres of picturesque Papago Park, a mile off a busy transcontinental highway, and a fifteen-minute drive from the teeming Arizona metropolis of Phoenix. But into its 306 acres are packed more than 10,000 specimens of flora, something from every continent, and each springtime it presents one of Mother Nature's most alluring flower shows.” The Garden, which was spearheaded in the 1930s by Gertrude Webster, Gustaf Starck and others, was only 8 when our story ran. However, for five of those years, it was essentially shut down because of World War II. After the war, students and scientists from the most renowned gardens in Germany and London, which had been destroyed in the bombing raids, came to Papago Park to study under the direction of W. Taylor Marshall, who was named director of DBG in 1946.

“Despite the fact that many of the desert species of plant life, and most of the cacti, are exclusively American plants,” Mr. Marshall said, “the research for centuries has been carried on in Europe. But with those great research laboratories being victims of war's destructive forces, I believe this scenic area of the Arizona desert is destined to become the leading botanical garden for the study of desert plants. We have the climate, the soil and the natural habitat.” He was right. Today, researchers at DBG collaborate with colleagues around the globe. And the work they're doing is leading to the discovery of new plant species, the conservation of endangered species, and an understanding of the effects of climate change on desert habitats. In addition, the Garden is home to a collection of 400 rare, threatened or endangered desert plant species. But that's only a small percentage of what's there.

In all, DBG protects 50,000 plant specimens from every continent except Antarctica — we got that wrong back in 1947. The line about walking the length of the Garden in “five minutes” is wrong, too. I know, because I tried. Even with Walter Olafsson chasing me, I couldn't have done it. But Mr. McClain was right about the rest of that sentence: “... if you pause to inspect its flowers on any warm spring day, you'll be in the Desert Botanical Garden of Arizona for hours.” It's hard to predict what the spring bloom will bring this year — Mother Nature likes to mess with us — but we did get some decent rain in December, so there's some hope for something good. Regardless, the Sonoran Desert is an incredibly beautiful ecosystem that's home to more than 2,000 native plants, at least 60 species of mammals, 100 reptiles, 30 species of native fish and 350 kinds of birds.

It's not what you look at that matters. It's what you see.