Lifestyle
Will unseasonably hot weather dash Southern California’s hopes for a 2026 superbloom?
Wildflower expert Naomi Fraga was excited about the prospect of an extraordinary bloom this spring, after a winter of near-record rainfall, but this week’s unseasonably hot, dry weather has dimmed her hopes for a superbloom year.
“Superblooms are not guaranteed every year, even after lots of rain,” said Fraga, director of conservation programs at California Botanic Garden in Claremont. “When it happens, it’s extraordinary, but you need all the stars to align, with rain, temperature and timing. We’ve had some of those ingredients, but it remains to be seen if the weather will cooperate to give us a spectacular bloom year.”
California certainly has had the rainfall — it’s been the second-wettest season through January that L.A. has seen in 21 years, according to the Los Angeles Almanac. And the rainy weather came at the right time to give SoCal lots of colorful blooms this spring, traditionally around mid-March through April in Southern California, Fraga said.
But wildflowers also need at least six weeks of coolish weather to grow after they germinate. Despite the rain, Southern California had record warm temperatures in November and December, Fraga said, “and we’re seemingly headed that way in January.”
Fields of wildflowers paint the hills yellow, orange and purple along Highway 58 and Seven Mile Road near the Carrizo Plain National Monument on April 1, 2023.
(Laura Dickinson / San Luis Obsipo Tribune)
A surge of hot weather, like what SoCal is experiencing this week, can damage young plants, either forcing them into a lackluster early bloom “that fizzles fast or desiccating emerging buds that won’t make it into production,” Fraga said.
The average high temperature in January for downtown L.A. is 68 degrees, but Wednesday’s high was 83 degrees, said Rose Schoenfeld, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
The Greater Los Angeles area isn’t expected to reach record highs this week, but it will get close. The high on Wednesday was just a few degrees shy of downtown L.A.’s record high of 88 degrees for Jan. 14, which occurred in 1975, Schoenfeld said.
The best hope for a potential superbloom is if SoCal gets some cool, wet weather next week, Fraga said, but the chances of that are iffy. Temperatures are expected to cool some, National Weather Service Meteorologist Mike Wofford said, “but they’ll still be about 5 degrees above normal next week.”
Right now, it’s possible SoCal will see a small amount of rain between Jan. 22 and Jan. 24, Wofford said, but it won’t be a large amount, “maybe a quarter inch.”
Nonetheless, Fraga said she’s still excited to see what kind of bloom SoCal has this spring, especially after last year’s massive fires in the area.
A Plummer’s mariposa lily blooming in Los Angeles.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Southern California may not get a superbloom this year, she said, but we do have a good chance of seeing spectacular “fire followers,” native flowers that typically emerge after a wildfire such as native snap dragons, dense stands of lupine, whispering bells and one of the most eagerly anticipated, the deep pink, lavender, white and yellow Plummer’s mariposa lily, a species that is endemic to the SoCal. (On Instagram, San Francisco Bay Area-based naturalist Damon Tighe posted some breathtaking photos of the flowers he took in 2022.)
The region has already seen some early wildflower displays in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, probably triggered by rain last fall.
Fraga said she hasn’t given up hope of spectacular displays around L.A. this spring.
She has vivid memories of what she considers to be the region’s biggest bloom years over the last 20 years: in 2005, her first as a young botanist, 2016 and 2023, when our hills and fields were blanketed in colorful displays of California poppies, lupine, phacelia, blazing star and other native annuals.
“Obviously the visual displays are incredible,” she said, “but some of the memories that stick with me the most are the smells — the smells you don’t get in a more average year. One year I came cross a population of lacy phacelia in Red Rock Canyon State Park. You see these flowers growing in patches here and there, but this time, I found this huge mass. And this smell was permeating the air. I couldn’t help wondering what it was until I realized it was the plants emanating this perfume, and there were so many pollinators attracted by its scent.”
Sometimes, she said, the scents from these mass groupings have been overwhelming, like the time she and her plant-enthusiast husband came across a huge patch of a rather humble white annual known as linanthus jonesii, which closes its flowers during the day and opens them at dusk to attract moths.
They had been out all day, and were preparing to leave, “when this smell came into the air. I told my husband, ‘I smell Cup Noodles soup,’ and then I looked at the ground and saw all these flowers were opening. The smell had a very umami [vibe], like ramen, but then it got to be too much. And we started running to our car, because the smell was just nauseating.”
The Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wild Flower Hotline is a good way to keep track of where flowers are blooming, but it won’t start up until March 1. So in the meantime, wildflower lovers should keep their fingers crossed for cooler weather.
Fraga said she’s still hopeful for what will be coming this spring. “More moisture and cooling would help a lot,” she said, “but you never know when these superblooms will happen. It could still happen this year because we had lots of rain. So no matter what, I’m excited for the spring, because it’s a great time to enjoy the outdoors and see an incredible display by nature.”
Lifestyle
Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective
Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.
“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”
The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”
L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.
The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.
Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.
“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”
A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.
The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”
Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”
The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.
All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.
Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.
Lifestyle
Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Lifestyle
Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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