Posted: Friday, March 2, 2012 7:32 pm | Updated: 7:53 pm, Fri Mar 2, 2012.

YUCCA VALLEY Hes a little nerdy about flowers, Stefanie Ritter, Hi-Desert Nature Museum biologist said as she introduced the speaker at Wednesdays lecture.

The unorthodox intro drew titters of laughter from the audience. Most of the crowd knew Mark Wheeler and his knowledge and affinity for botany. They also knew Ritter and Wheeler are married and the biologists German-accented ebullience provides the perfect foil to Wheelers low-key, fact-filled delivery style.

The plant expert provided a primer on spring wildflowers and how to read the desert bloom from the big picture overview with its miles and miles of color to the beauty of the smallest bloom, best appreciated through a magnifying glass.

The beauty is there, Wheeler said as he projected an image of a colorful carpet of annual blooms, accompanied by oohs and aahs of the people present. The intensely vivid photo was from the bloom of 1998, reverently referred to as a 100-year bloom.

As a contrast to the image showing the sea of colors, Wheeler projected a shot of a gilia plant with 35 blooms. For scale, the botanist had placed his pocket knife in the photo. The plant easily fit within the length of the closed-blade knife.

Famously low tech, Wheeler briefly attempted to operate a laser pointer to highlight the points on a chia bloom before declaring, I dont like all this high-tech stuff, and used his finger to make his point on the screen.

Among the many mind-bogglers of desert bloomology are how many seeds are produced. A very patient scientist counted 63,800 seeds in a square meter of sand in the Colorado Desert.

These guys produce a lot of seeds, Wheeler said with obvious understatement as he worked through his slide show.

Annuals make the big blooms, filling the space between shrubs each spring, Wheeler explained. Annual blooms are more affected by heat, wind, floods and other environmental extremes than the perennial blooms of shrubs and trees.

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Flowers are plants’ shot at immortality