Southern California is having a great wildflower year but is it really a superbloom?

"The term ‘superbloom’ is a media construct with no botanical or ecological origin,” said Cameron Barrows, an associate research ecologist at UC Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology. 

Richard Minnich, a professor of earth sciences at UC Riverside, and author of the book, “California’s Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions,” said “it’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

To Minnich, a superbloom happens once in a generation, like the legendary flower explosion Death Valley and the Coachella Valley experienced in 2005. Barrows remembers 1991, when scientists, not the media, talked about the “March Miracle” in the Coachella Valley.

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