[Illustration: Baeria chrysostoma variety gracilis]
Common names: GOLDFIELDS
Arizona desert: (_Baeria chrysostoma_). Yellow. March-May.
Sunflower family. Size: Low growing, usually under 6 inches.
After winters of particularly heavy precipitation, these small
close-growing annuals with their sunflower-like blossoms cover large
patches of desert with a carpet of gold. Individual flowers are so small
and so inconspicuous among larger plants that they are easily passed
unnoticed, but millions of the plants all in blossom at the same time
make a spectacular display that attracts visitors from considerable
distances.
They occur in Arizona below 3,600 feet, westward to California, Lower
California, and north to Oregon. A plant of winter and early springtime,
Goldfields takes advantage of winter moisture and cool spring weather to
produce its flowers and mature its seeds. Thus it escapes the heat and
drought of the desert by lying dormant in the seed stage until the
moisture and cool temperatures of the following winter awaken it.
In common with Goldpoppy and other annuals that mature their seeds
before the summer heat descends upon the desert, Goldfields cannot
correctly be called a “desert plant.” Actually these are plants of
cooler climes which have found winter conditions in the desert ideal for
their needs and have established themselves.
These plants demonstrate effectively one method, that of escaping the
heat and drought, by which plants have adapted themselves to survival in
the desert. Like the winter tourist, they take advantage of ideal
climatic conditions of winter and spring. Since, unlike the winter
tourist, they cannot return north for the summer, they take the next
best course and pass through the hot, dry period in the dormancy of the
seed phase of their life cycles.