World traveler Robert Helgeson shares this photo from his home library. My new book, Great Escapes: Southern California, is the fourth book from the right. “As you can see it occupies space along with all of our other treasured guide books,” he says.
Thank you, Robert. I’m honored!
Next weekend is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a sprawling outdoor affair that regularly draws 100,000 book lovers to the UCLA campus every spring. (Who says people in LA don’t read?!)
The festival is great fun. You’ll see throngs of people lined up in the sunshine outside lecture halls, waiting — and obviously excited — to join conversations about current events, current fiction, and the latest offerings from sci-fi masters and chick-lit queens. Poets give impassioned readings under the big tent outside Powell Library. Open-air stages feature celebrated chefs and celebrities touting their children’s books. I love to browse the dozens of booksellers, publishers, museums, non-profit foundations, and retailers who set up shop along UCLA’s grassy plazas.
More than 400 authors appear on Saturday and Sunday (tickets to daytime events are free), so you’ll find plenty of great choices. A festival map is here.
I’ll be at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, signing copies of My California: Journeys by Great Writers from 1 to 2 pm with Edward Humes and Veronique de Turenne. Please be sure to stop by the Angel City Press Booth (#332, near Royce Hall) and say hello.
Laura Cohen pulls out a tiny composition book and scribbles madly as we meander through Laguna Canyon Wilderness Park.
She is busily, energetically, joyfully chronicling the triumphant return of the spring wildflowers that practically disappeared from the canyon — and much of Southern California’s other parched wild spaces — in the past few years.
What a difference a few inches of gentle rain makes. This spring the hills are different. Better. Wetter. So lush that Laguna Canyon looks like someone rolled out the green carpet. The blooms seem to multiply overnight and Cohen’s flower journal grows daily with them, the park naturalist’s excitement palpable with each new speck of color bursting amid the grasslands and coastal sage scrub.
Cohen leads the way as we savor stands of willowy coast sunflowers swaying in the afternoon breeze near a couple of inviting picnic tables. Another flash of sweet yellow catches the sun and our attention: small violets called Johnny-Jump-Ups. We stop to watch a hummingbird gorge on flaming orange monkey flowers, then we roam past fuchsia-flowered gooseberry plants, white popcorn flowers, tangles of prickly wild cucumbers, and purple phacelia poking out between the rocks. Farther up along the trails, bright ruby poppies dance along Serrano Ridge. In all, Cohen catalogs more than twenty different wildflowers. Her prized discovery: delicate pink clumps of owl’s clover. “It’s very rare,” she says, “one of my favorite plants.”
Across Southern California, from coastal fields and hillsides to the desert’s sprawling wild lands, botanists and park rangers and flower lovers of all species are reveling in the best wildflower season in recent memory. It’s a great time of year to pack a picnic lunch and just wander.
I wrote about Southern California’s wildflowers for the Los Angeles Times Magazine this weekend and you can read the story here.
Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, of course, is a magical place any time of year. Other wildflower spots include the California Poppy Reserve in the Antelope Valley; Anza-Borrego Desert State Park; and Joshua Tree National Park. The wildflower season is expected to last into May.
Journalist (and poker buddy) Michelle Nicolosi is getting reading for a cross-country adventure and poses this question at LinkedIn: What’s the coolest off-the-beaten-path place in the U.S.?
Check out the responses (including mine) and add your two cents here.
*The photo above comes from a remote corner of SoCal that also would make a fine addition to Michelle’s list — the Rankin Ranch. It’s so far off-the-beaten path that rush hour consists of your car and a herd of cows.
