The spring of 1998 was the Halley’s Comet of desert wildflower years. While nearly everyone else on the planet was cursing the soggy consequences of El Niño’s downpours, here in southern Arizona we were cheering for the show: Our desert hills and valleys were colorized in wild schemes of maroon, indigo, tangerine, and some hues that Crayola hasn’t named yet. Our mountains wore mantles of yellow brittlebush on their rocky shoulders, as fully transformed as eastern forests in their colorful autumn foliage. Abandoned cotton fields—flat, salinized ground long since left for dead—rose again, wearing brocade. Even highway medians were so crowded with lupines and poppies that they looked like the seed-packet promises come true: that every one came up. For weeks, each day’s walk to the mailbox became a botanical treasure hunt, as our attention caught first on new colors, then on whole new species in this terrain we thought we had already cataloged.

The first warm days of March appear to call out a kind of miracle here: the explosion of nearly half our desert’s flowering species, all stirred suddenly into a brief cycle of bloom and death. Actually, though, the call begins subtly, much earlier, with winter rains and gradually climbing temperatures. The intensity of the floral outcome varies a great deal from one spring to another; that much is obvious to anyone who ventures outdoors at the right time of year and pays attention. But even couch potatoes could not have missed the fact that 1998 was special: Full-color wildflower photos made the front page of every major newspaper in the Southwest.

Our friends from other climes couldn’t quite make out what the fuss was about. Many people aren’t aware that the desert blooms at all, even in a normal year, and few would guess how much effort we devote to waiting and prognosticating. “Is this something like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day?” asked a friend from the East.

“Something like that. Or the fall color in New England. All winter the experts take measurements and make forecasts. This year they predicted gold, but it’s already gone platinum. In a spot where you’d expect a hundred flowers, we’ve got a thousand. More kinds than anybody alive has ever seen at once.”

“But these are annual flowers?”

“Right.”

“Well, then….” Our nonbiologist friend struggled to frame her question: “If they weren’t there last year, and this year they are, then who planted them?”

One of us blurted, “God planted them!”

We glanced at each other nervously: A picturesque response indeed, from scientifically trained types like ourselves. Yet it seemed more compelling than any pedestrian lecture on life cycles and latency periods. Where had they all come from? Had these seeds just been lying around in the dirt for decades? And how was it that, at the behest of some higher power than the calendar, all at once there came a crowd?

The answers to these questions tell a tale as complex as a Beethoven symphony. Before a concert, you could look at a lot of sheet music and try to prepare yourself mentally for the piece it inscribed, but you’d still be knocked out when you heard it performed. With wildflowers, as in a concert, the magic is in the timing, the subtle combinations—and, most important, the extent of the preparations.

For a species, the bloom is just the means to an end. The flower show is really about making seeds, and the object of the game is persistence through hell or high water, both of which are features of the Sonoran Desert. In winter, when snow is falling on much of North America, we get slow, drizzly rains that can last for days and soak the whole region to its core. The Navajo call these female rains, as opposed to the “male rains” of late summer—those rowdy thunderstorms that briefly disrupt the hot afternoons, drenching one small plot of ground while the next hill over remains parched. It’s the female rains that affect spring flowering, and in some years, such as 1998, the benefaction trails steadily from winter on into spring. In others, after a lick and a promise, the weather dries up for good.

Challenging conditions for an ephemeral, these are. If a little seed begins to grow at the first promise of rain, and that promise gets broken, that right there is the end of its little life. If the same thing happened to every seed in the bank, it would mean the end of the species. But it doesn’t happen that way. Desert wildflowers have had millennia in which to come to terms with their inconstant mother. Once the plant has rushed through growth and flowering, its seeds wait in the soil—and not just until the next time conditions permit germination, but often longer. In any given year, a subset of a species’s seeds don’t germinate, because they’re programmed for a longer dormancy. This seed bank is the plant’s protection against a beckoning rain followed by drought. If any kind of wildflower ever existed whose seeds all sprouted and died before following through to seed-set, then that species perished long ago. This is what natural selection is about. The species that have made it this far have encoded genetic smarts enough to outwit every peril. They produce seeds with different latency periods: Some germinate quickly, and some lie in wait, not just loitering there but loading the soil with many separate futures.

Scientists at the University of Arizona have spent years examining the intricacies of seed banks. Desert ephemerals, they’ve learned, use a surprising variety of strategies to fine-tune their own cycles to a climate whose cycles are not predictable—or at least, not predictable given the relatively short span of human observation. Even in a year as wet as 1998, when photo-ops and seed production exploded, the natives were not just seizing the moment; they were stashing away future seasons of success by varying, among and within species, their genetic schedules for germination, flowering, and seed-set. This variation reduces the intense competition that would result if every seed germinated at once. Some species even vary seed size: Larger seeds make more resilient sprouts, and smaller ones are less costly to produce; either morph may be programmed for delayed germination, depending on the particular strategy of the species. As a consequence of these sophisticated adaptations, desert natives can often hold their own against potential invasion by annual plants introduced from greener, more predictable pastures. You have to get up awfully early in the morning to outwit a native on its home turf.

The scientific term for these remarkable plants, “ephemeral annuals,” suggests something that’s as fragile as a poppy petal, a captive to the calendar. That is our misapprehension, along with our notion of this floral magic show—now you see it, now you don’t—as a thing we can predict and possess like a garden. In spite of our determination to contain what we see in neat, annual packages, the blazing field of blues and golds is neither a beginning nor an end. It’s just a blink, or maybe a smile, in the long life of a species whose blueprint for perseverance must outdistance all our record books. The flowers will go on mystifying us, answering to a clock that ticks so slowly we won’t live long enough to hear it.