Regarding Seasons

Like many parts of the world, but unlike much of our own United States, lowland California has not four seasons but two.  

These could variously be called:

• Wet and Dry
• Spring and Summer
• Growing and Dying
• Growing and Harvest
• Cool and Warm
• Green and Brown
• Advance and Retreat
• Live and Dead

And just as the names are open to debate or personal fancy, so are the dates—the pie can be sliced in any number of ways depending in large measure on the particular plant or animal you are interested in, and to a degree also on your own definitions and ways of seeing it.

It can be done, although very imperfectly, by the calendar.  The standard cusps of the four seasons have long been equated with the four cardinal points of the solar year, i.e. the solstices and equinoxes:  summer solstice on June 21, winter solstice on December 21, vernal equinox ca. March 21, autumnal equinox ca. September 21.  Obviously, this system doesn’t work at all for us, unless we might possibly settle on September 21 or December 21 as the beginning of spring (instead of fall or winter) and March 21 or June 21 as the beginning of summer.

A more satisfactory approach would be that of the “moveable feast”, letting Mother Nature (in the form of rain) call the tune.

In my book at least, and no doubt in the “books” of most of our “native” predecessors, and certainly in those of most plants and animals that preceded us on these favored shores, the one clear seasonal cusp (the one heralding the onset of our “spring” or “growth season”) is not tied to a particular date at all, but to an event—the first good “serious” rain.  This too is open to some debate, as to, for example, what constitutes a “serious” rain.  For me it is the one that sprouts the grass—this effectively leaves the call to wiser heads than ours.*  True, there are sometimes “false starts”, with a good, soaking rain followed by long hot weeks of drought that threaten to wither and kill all those over-confident little seedlings before another storm comes along.  Or, especially in the south, the kickoff can be delayed to the point of threatening a brown Christmas.  Or a good soaker may, in some places and some years, never come at all, and summer may last for years!

But, in the main, depending on latitude and rain-shadow effect, the blessed event can usually be counted on somewhere between the end of September and the middle of December, with follow-up rains to keep the ball rolling through January and February and even, in good years, all the way through March and even into April.

[Insert section regarding the poetry of the event, and Rain Beetles, etc. etc.]

The other cusp, on the other hand, the one marking the beginning of summer, is more problematic.  In fact it acts more like a broad band of dates rather than one point.  For Lepidium nitidum, spring is over only a couple of months after it began—two months of spring and ten months of dead.  For Santa Cruz tarweed, spring might last six months or even twelve! [expand, with more examples including flowering trees, etc.]

The severity of the summer, its onset and duration, all vary from place to place and from year to year.  In general, though, for most of lowland California, spring and summer are announced in the landscape by grasslands—green hills in spring, golden brown in summer.  And in most years, the browning begins on hot, south slopes and patches of thin soil toward the end of March, and the browning is complete by the middle of May.