This California wildflower is intriguing enough to headline a free festival

Welcome to May! A few weeks ago, UCLA professor Victoria Sork guided a group of her students into Will Rogers State Historic Park to monitor Santa Monica Mountains wildfire recovery. As they hiked, Sork was delighted to discover a particular wildflower already in bloom: Clarkia unguiculata, commonly known as Elegant Clarkia.

On May 16, Sork and the school’s Mathias Botanical Garden will put the beloved-but-niche California native wildflower on display during the second annual Clarkia Flower Festival.

“We didn’t want to say, ‘Let’s just do poppies,’” said Sork, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and the botanical garden’s director. “This is an opportunity to educate people about the diversity of wildflowers.”

Her focus is local oaks, but the garden announced in 2024 that it would make Clarkia its centerpiece. The garden’s logo, designed by New York advertising agency Little Big Brands, now features four of the 40 species that make up the Clarkia genus.

Perhaps the most famous Clarkia, Clarkia amoena, is commonly called Farewell to Spring. Indeed, the plant often blooms later in the spring than most of its wildflower peers. But at the garden’s so-called Clarkia Hill, several species have already been in bloom for weeks, alongside California poppies and a number of other native California wildflowers.

An April visit offered shades of yellow, gold, orange, pink, red and purple. Just about every other color can be found somewhere in the garden too. A month ahead of its big day, the garden already stunned with an array of native and nonnative plants along its serpentine paths. The goal is to time full bloom for Clarkia Hill perfectly with this month’s event. Also, this year, garden staffers have also been planting native perennials on the hill to keep something in season for much of the year.

“Otherwise,” Sork said, “the rest of the time it looks like a weed patch.”

The 2025 festival debut attracted roughly 1,500 visitors, about 10 times what the garden attracts on a typical Saturday. In 2026, garden staffers are hoping for a similar turnout.

Forty-plus community partner groups will be in attendance, from North East Trees to the Los Angeles Public Library. So will various vendors of food, drinks and goods. Flower-themed arts and crafts will be created, and one lemon tree will be designated a wishing tree for the occasion. The garden is also planning musical performances, nature walks, an herbarium open house, and two professor talks on Tongva basket weaving and the Clarkia plant.

UCLA’s plentiful signage in the garden details the human history that intertwines with Clarkias and so many other plants. The university uses Indigenous names on dozens of plant signs across the garden.

Clarkias are named after prominent explorer William Clark, who, along with Meriwether Lewis, took his personal slave York on their most famous expedition. Some nurseries and scholars have in recent years taken to calling the plant Yorkia to honor the enslaved man’s many contributions, botanical and otherwise, on the journey.

“The thing about gardens is, you can tell stories,” Sork said. “You can educate people. It’s just a nice way to get people to stand back and look.”

Chantal Ochoa-Clark, the garden’s manager of outreach and education, said the 2025 festival demonstrated there is community demand for plant events.

“People are really interested in activities like this,” she said. “We’re happy to be able to provide a space to do this for free.”

The 7½-acre botanical garden is open to the public daily. More than 2,500 schoolchildren from across the Los Angeles area alone have visited since the garden began accepting visits from K-12 schools during the 2021-22 school year.

The free Clarkia Flower Festival is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. May 16 at 707 Tiverton Drive. For more information about SoCal botanical gardens, visit The Times’ guide here.

As seen in: Los Angeles Times.