Millville Plains Wildflowers
Driving Field Trip, April 2, 2023

Field trip attendees. D. Ledger.
Field trip attendees on the April 2, 2023, driving tour to Millville Plains, Redding, to see spring wildflowers. Photo by David Ledger.

Shasta Chapter CNPS and Shasta Environmental Alliance co-sponsored a wildflowers car tour to Millville Plains, Redding, on a cool April 2 Sunday to view the usually magnificent wildflower show in this area. We had 13 people along. For the most part, we carpooled to save on greenhouse gases.

Field trip attendees. D. Ledger.
Field trip attendees on a stop to look for wildflowers during the driving tour at Millville Plains, Redding. Photo taken April 2, 2023, by David Ledger.

We stopped at three places on Millville Plains Road, finding that different flowers were predominant at each stop. At the first stop, we found that tidy-tips and yellow-carpets dominated, with a scattering of lowland shooting stars, bicolor lupines, and popcorn flowers. At the next stop, goldfields seemed to dominate the area, with scattered redmaids, spokepods, and lomatiums. The third stop yielded woolly meadowfoam, many fryingpan poppies, a tall species of popcorn flower, and fringepod.

Rosy meadowfoam and yellow carpets. D. Ledger.
Rosy meadowfoam, Limnanthes douglasii ssp. rosea, and a few yellow carpets, Blennosperma nanum var. nanum, near Parkville Road, Anderson. Photo taken by David Ledger on the April 2, 2023, driving field trip.

Our last stop was the Parkville Cemetery where we found rosy meadowfoam, pigmyweed, more goldfields, yellow-carpets, and fiddlenecks, among others. About this time, it started to rain on this cold and windy day, but the 13 of us enjoyed the camaraderie while seeing all the wildflowers. ~David Ledger