The Brookston Family Blog

Several years ago, when we were living in Oakland, I discovered a little-known California Impressionist artist by the name of Granville Redmond. The Oakland Museum has a few of his pieces and they did a retrospective of him a few years ago, from which they produced a pretty cool book of his works. He was active in the early part of last century and like many California impressionists painted impressive fields of wildflowers and especially poppies. We have a print of his hanging above the fireplace called Land of Poppies.

Anyway, that got me very interested in seeing these fields of wildflowers but it's something we never quite found the time to pursue. Well lately, there have been several newspapers articles extolling the wildflowers this year in Southern California because of all the rain they received this winter. The best times are usually mid-March through the end of April but it seemed like every weekend something came up that kept us from heading south. Finally, we gave up and decided a short whirlwind overnighter was better than missing it entirely, so that's what we did. We loaded up the station wagon Sunday morning and drove all day to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve near Lancaster, California, which is where Edwards Air Force Base is located.

With all four of us, plus Sarah's Mom Ruthanne, we arrived in Lancaster around six in the evening, a little less than an hour and a half before sunset. It was very windy and the poppies had already closed up for the night. We checked into a hotel for the evening in the hopes of getting an early start the next day before driving back home Monday evening.



Porter on the trail Sunday evening.



Porter finds a caterpillar.