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“It’s a complicated legacy,” she said, pausing near a patch of purple owl’s clover, a native wildflower.

We still have our California lupine and poppies, owl’s clover and tidy tips, but where once they bloomed, as Frank McDonough has read, from the Altadena plain to San Pedro, now there are the merest patches, except in the high deserts, where a rainy superbloom season — this won’t be one — births blues and oranges so wide and intense that you still see them shimmering even after you close your eyes.

Mendelsohn pointed out large swaths of five-petaled Parry’s phacelia, common to slopes in the western Santa Monicas; owl’s clover, with a flower cluster that looks like a paint brush; and stinging lupine, a pinkish-purple flower featuring long, stiff hairs on the stem and leaves that sting skin when touched.

In his third book, “Owl’s Clover,” issued by a leftist publisher, in 1936, Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time.

The north slopes, however, are angled away from the sun and covered with the best patches of wildflowers, including poppies, goldfields, forget-me-nots, gold cups, cream cups, owl’s clover and lupine.