EDITOR'S LETTER

I'm not familiar with the scent of a pale evening primrose. I've hiked past them in the Grand Canyon. And probably at Pinta Sands in Cabeza Prieta. But I've never knelt down to breathe in their scent. Expedition has always gotten in the way go, go, go. And so has the nature of the flower. Like lounge singers and cat burglars, evening primroses only come out at night. "They'll wait until the world's tucked in and the sky's one ceaseless shimmer," Rita Dove wrote in her beautiful poem about the flower, "then lift their saturated eyelids and blaze, blaze all night long for no one." It's an evolved strategy to lure in hawk moths, bats and other nighttime pollinators, but if you don't have wings and nocturnal tendencies, you have to work a little harder to see their bloom. And smell their scent.I haven't done the work it's always go, go, go so I asked Wendy Hodgson. She's a senior research botanist at Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. She says the scent of a pale evening primrose is incredibly sweet a floral aroma that rivals any perfume you'd find at Bergdorf Goodman. It's one of her favorite flowers. She's fond of birdcage evening primrose, too. It's another night owl with a sweet fragrance.

March is the month when we celebrate the emergence of wildflowers in the Sonoran Desert. Like monarch butterflies returning to Pismo Beach in the winter, the flowers show up every spring and put on a show. Goldpoppies, globemallows, hyacinths, lupines, owl's clover, verbenas, creamcups, primroses ... they're radiant dancers in a chorus line orchestrated by Mother Nature. It's enough to make even the most hardened antago-nists acknowledge the undeniable beauty of our desert, especially in the spring. It's a season that "laughs at definitions," Joyce Rockwood Muench wrote in our March 1960 issue, "and lays out horizons that defy painter, photographer or writer, as perhaps no other kind of landscape can. All over the desert, where countless unnoticed little dry washes stand ready for summer-rain runoffs, spring flows in casual rivers of color poppies seem to favor them particularly, with an occasional shift of emphasis when white-petaled evening primroses nudge their yellow neighbors."

A year ago, those rivers were raging with wildflowers, because six months earlier, their seeds germinated at exactly the right time, the rains came repeatedly in precise amounts, and the desert was endowed with a "superbloom." Like a supernova, a superbloom is a rare and mighty explosion, one that comes around every 10 years or so and covers the landscape with an array of color, as if Monet had gone on a bender. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it reinforces your belief in God or Mother Nature or some combination of the two. There's a feeling you get when you walk through the Giant Forest in the Sierra Nevada. Nothing on Earth can prepare you for the scale of a sequoia. It brings a feeling of reverential respect and wonder. There's a surreal nature to it, too, like walking through one of Grimms' fairy tales. The superbloom prompts a similar sensation. It doesn't seem real.

This year, there won't be a superbloom, but spring is about more than just the wildflowers. It's a time when darkness gives way to light. A time of hope, rebirth and renewal. It's also a time to savor the wonders of nature. "As spring enters upon the scene," Raymond Carlson wrote, "we can woo her in all her moods, merry or melancholy, across the broad, rich land. We can play truant from care and raise our eyes to the far horizons and the tantalizing vistas of earth and sky wrapped in spring's flossiest lace. We can seek anew the beauty of the smiling land, for there is magic and sorcery in her invitation to each and all of us."

The Japanese embrace something known as shinrin-yoku, which means "forest bathing" or "taking in the forest atmosphere." It caught on about 40 years ago as a way of getting people off the couch and into the woods, but the notion wasn't new. "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread," John Muir wrote in 1912, "places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike." And before Mr. Muir, almost every culture recognized the powerful correlation between the natural world and human health.

Although shinrin-yoku is focused on the forest, a walk among the wildflowers can have the same effect. In the same way that you can inhale the scent of a tree, you can inhale the scent of a flower. Maybe more so. And there will be flowers this spring, even in an off year. But they won't be around for long, so you need to find your way to the desert to the Superstition Mountains, Picacho Peak, Salt River Canyon, the Ironwood Forest, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. And when you get there, be sure to stop, kneel and breathe in the scent of the wildflowers. It's OK to slow down for a few hours.

If you will, I will.