When wildflowers are popping, good luck keeping up with Bob Allen.

The Orange County botanist, professor, author and photographer is either hurrying to teach another class, leading a hike or trudging up a trail with his photo gear to capture a rare bloom for his upcoming field guide.

“I’m busy cause I’ve got things to photograph,” Allen said this week. “It’s an awful lot of fun.”

He knows what is blooming, and where. He took a recent trip to Silverado Canyon, for instance, with students from Irvine Valley College.

“It was terrific,” he said. “We had chaparral sweet pea fully in bloom along the road.

“Poison oak is in leaf, little tiny yellow flowers. Nice plant; I just wish it didn’t cause dermatitis. And coast live oaks — it has tiny flowers that hang in a real dense cluster that droops straight down a few inches. Some of the willows are flowering…”

He’s found plenty of poppies, which wake up when the sun shines.

“In Modjeska Canyon, we’ve got collar lupine up, Coulter’s lupine, arroyo lupine,” he said. “Blackberries are about to start flowering.”

Allen only considers native flowers, although some non-natives, such as black mustard, put on showy displays as well. “I don’t give any props at all to the weeds,” he said.

“Wild cucumber, one of my favorite plants, is up all over the place,” he said. “It grows from a gigantic tuber that gets as big as we are. It grows fruit that can be larger than a softball, and covered in spines.”

Alas, the cucumber itself is inedible.

“The one in salad, we humans have artificially selected for thousands of years,” he said. “In wild cucumbers, there’s really no meat.”

Wait — he’s not finished.

“Red berry is in flower,” he says. “Another really awesome one is California bay laurel. If you take the leaf and rub it you get a very strong smell of bay.

“We have dozens of cluster flower species locally. It’s the most common species up now: shades of purple, kind of an indigo, bluish-purple. Last year they put on a huge show — big fields of these things. Right now, it’s a little early.”

Once spring is in full swing, the place should be alive with flowers.

“I think it’s going to be a terrific year throughout Orange County,” he said, although “I’m a little worried about the heat spell we had in January; some of the seedlings dried up.”

Still, “this is going to be a good year because there’s a lot of fresh seed from last year’s bloom still in the soil. And we had a really nice series of rains. Those two things coupled together will make for a really good wildflower year.”

Allen urges anyone captivated by wildflowers to find a good flower walk or hike led by an expert.

Allen himself is leading walks for the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. He also suggests checking the docent-led hikes with the Irvine Ranch Conservancy and the Orange County chapter of the California Native Plant Society, not to mention Orange County’s wilderness parks.

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