Antelope Valley Poppies
— — the colour the desert keeps for two weeks each spring.
Not only on a wall.
“A grassland reserve in the Mojave foothills west of Lancaster, on the high-desert side of the Tehachapi Mountains. Most of the year the slopes are pale gold and stitched together with creosote. Then a wet winter passes, the rains soak through, and for two or three weeks in late March and early April the hillsides go orange. Eschscholzia californica, California's state flower, opens petal by petal as the sun climbs and closes again on cold mornings and against the wind. The first cars queue at the gate before sunrise. By lunch the back loops are quiet.
Antelope Valley Poppies, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve sits at 15101 Lancaster Road, in the western Antelope Valley about 15 miles west of Lancaster and roughly 85 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The protected grassland covers 1,781 acres at an elevation of 2,600 to 3,000 feet, on the high-desert side of the Tehachapi Mountains where the Mojave begins. The reserve was established in 1976 to protect the most consistent stand of Eschscholzia californica, California's state flower, and is administered by the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Roughly seven miles of trail cross the rolling hills, including a paved loop near the Jane S. Pinheiro Interpretive Center.
The California poppy is phototropic. Its four petals open as the air warms and close again on cold mornings, in wind, or under heavy cloud, so the orange on the hillside arrives and retreats with the sun across the course of a single day. The petals draw their colour from carotenoid pigments concentrated in the cell layers, the same family of pigments that make a carrot orange and a maple leaf burn at the edge in October. The reserve does not stand alone: owl's clover lays a pink wash across the lower draws, goldfields stitch the meadows yellow, and lupine, cream cups, and coreopsis fill in the seams between.
Wildflowers in the reserve appear from mid-February through mid-May, but the peak orange is narrower than that. Most years the slopes reach their fullest colour in late March and early April, and the window is set the previous autumn and winter by how much rain falls on the Mojave foothills. In dry years the bloom is brief and patchy. In the superbloom years of recent memory the orange ran continuously over the hills and could be seen from the air. The Jane S. Pinheiro Interpretive Center opens March 1 each spring and closes the day after Mother's Day. The reserve itself is open sunrise to sunset, year-round, with a $10 per vehicle day-use fee.