Lupines and lilacs, popcorn and poppies: Orange County’s wildflowers are beginning to erupt, showing off their reds, blues, golds, yellows and pinks just in time for the start of spring.

Thanks to recent cool weather, the wildflower peak in the county’s hills is still a few weeks away, two of the county’s busiest botanists say.

But there’s already plenty to see.

“We’re now seeing popcorn flower — they’re really going,” said biology professor Bob Allen, who spends this time of year tromping through the hills to photograph the best blooms he can find. “Padre shooting stars, California buttercup; I also need to mention lupines, a lot of them flowering really well right now.”

While Allen searches the hills and canyons for native wildflowers, Chris Barnhill tends 26 acres of them at the Fullerton Arboretum — a good place to go for a foretaste of the back country.

The Arboretum is broken up into sections displaying a variety of habitat types. There’s a subtropical garden with plants from Central and South America, Australia, Africa and other exotic places, a redwood grove, a primitive plant garden with cycads and ginkgoes, a Mediterranean section that includes Chilean plants as well as Southern California chaparral and scrub, and a Mojave desert section with sandy soil and cactus.

Among the more spectacular displays: an enormous California lilac exploding with blue flowers and buzzing with thousands of bees — so intent on pollen they seem to ignore passersby.

“Here in Orange County, things are just coming in now,” Barnhill said as he walked the grounds this week. “California lilacs are flowering now, chocolate lillies are already flowering, red maids. We’re spotting a lot of different things coming in; it will definitely be better than last year.”

As the wildflower blooms begin to peak, county parks will offer guided tours. In the meantime, Allen ran down the list of some of the best displays he’s seen so far:

-Along Ortega Highway. Look for California buttercup, chaparral pea and fiesta flower.

-Laguna Coast Wilderness Park and Caspers Wilderness Park should have good displays soon of a variety of flowers. Caspers should have blooms of the alluring purple fiesta flower in coming weeks, Allen predicts.

-Harding Canyon, near Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary. Look for chaparral pea.

-Santiago Canyon Road — though on private land, visible by car but not accessible, California poppies are covering hillsides.

-Irvine Regional Park should have plenty of coast live oak in flower; other oak woodland areas also should have them.

Thanks to decent winter rains that ended Orange County’s dry streak, the displays should be showier than they’ve been in years.

“The past couple of years have been really spotty,” Allen said. “This year we got tremendous water. The fact that it appeared in bursts of rain, then a break, then rain, then a break — that’s what wildflowers need.”

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