1-800-Flowers

By Juan Velasquez

Artwork courtesy of Theodore Payne Foundation

“There’s a hotline for wildflowers? Really?” was podcaster Dave Stachowiak’s initial reaction when he heard that his friend Tom Henschel would be narrating the Wild Flower Hotline, a podcast about plants… or something. A “hotline,” for those born after the internet—and for the purposes of this article—is a number you’d call to get all sorts of help, from movie showtimes and mental health support to tips on how to beat a difficult video game, and, thanks to the Theodore Payne Foundation, where to spot the season’s wildflower blooms.

Stachowiak admits that wildflowers weren’t something he was especially excited about until he tuned in to listen to his friend’s curious new voiceover gig. “I found so much delight and joy, both in listening to [Henschel’s] voice—because he has an amazing voice—and in the passion and joy he brings to something I would otherwise never think about,” he says via Zoom from his podcast studio. That sense of unexpected delight is the result of decades of work by the Theodore Payne Foundation.

Located 15 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles in Sun Valley, the nonprofit founded the hotline in 1983 and has run it each spring during wildflower bloom season ever since. Callers can check in weekly and listen to a voice recording explaining where—always on public land—they can find myriad California native wildflowers. Over the decades, the hotline has evolved: you can now listen online wherever you get your podcasts —worry not, you can still dial 818-768-1802 ext. 7 to hear it the old-fashioned way— but the mission has stayed the same.

Former Theodore Payne staffer Andrew Chaves explains the mission beautifully: “The Wild Flower Hotline is an educational resource that creates connections rather than simply delivering random facts about plants. It’s not marketing. It’s stewardship as a voicemail.”

On a sunny, slightly crisp Earth Day—an especially fitting backdrop—I visited the Theodore Payne Foundation and spoke with executive director Amy Greenwood. She noted that while Instagram and TikTok content can inspire a love of nature, it can also create a false sense of having already experienced it, even if only virtually. The Wild Flower Hotline, she argues, helps push people beyond passive scrolling and encourages them to actually go outside and encounter nature firsthand.

Greenwood is right—Instagram has commodified the beauty of the bloom. Take, for example, the hundreds of thousands of posts of the California poppy “superbloom” in the Antelope Valley. These places have become touristy, oversaturated, and influencer fodder. People go, trample flowers to get their selfies, post, and leave.

Nature need not be gatekept; far from it, people should enjoy it, but often without knowledge of where they are or the ramifications of interacting with these areas.

The weekly report and the folks at the Theodore Payne Foundation strive for reverence, not exploitation. Often, they highlight lesser-known locations, helping to draw attention away from the algorithm’s bloom du jour destinations and ease pressure on already oversaturated spots. The hotline doesn’t want to “blow up the spot,” but rather to “blow up the care,” as Genevieve Arnold, TPF’s seed and conservation program manager, so deftly puts it.

Beyond encouraging listeners to physically encounter nature, Arnold explains that education and advocacy around these native plants make those experiences more personally enriching for even the casual wildflower admirer. “What the Wild Flower Hotline does is give people the opportunity to go one step deeper and say, ‘Okay, not just where does this flower grow, but what is this place called? How do I get there? Is this part of a national park? Is this a preserve? What protections are in place for this area?’” she says, sitting in a swivel chair in front of her workspace.

Knowledge deepens connection. To know these plants is to love them, and to love them is to want to protect them. The hotline provides that crucial context. Arnold says the Wild Flower Hotline deepens people’s connection to a place by giving names to what they’ll see, preparing them to recognize the landscape as they arrive. “You’re taking it to that deeper level of remembering,” she adds. “It goes beyond stopping and taking selfies.”

Across from Arnold and myself sits Katie Tilford, director of development and communications—my guide and the key to unlocking TPF’s wonderfully nerdy botanical world. She’s been instrumental in connecting me with the people behind the foundation and the Wild Flower Hotline. In the midst of waxing poetic on all things wildflower, she makes an excellent point: the ultimate goal of the hotline and TPF is to inspire people to care about the outdoors and take an active role in conserving it, especially in a world that often seems determined to destroy it. “Preservation takes everyday people, not just scientists, botanists, or biologists. And that’s what the Wild Flower Hotline gives you—a person.”

That person Tilford is referring to is none other than Tom Henschel, a self-described “accidental gardener” and the narrator of the Wild Flower Hotline since 2023. A podcaster in his own right, Henschel’s timbre is measured, present, and soothing—imagine a more casual David Attenborough. His vocal cadence feels like: “You’re safe, pay attention, I’ve got you.” When you tune in, you hear him recite plant names such as chaparral snapdragon, cardinal catchfly, scarlet larkspur, and showy penstemon—playful, phonetically labyrinthine puzzle pieces that Henschel snaps together week after week. Through a laptop screen, Henschel says, “Before I record the hotline every week, I have two things in my heart: joy and wonder.” Smiling, he adds, “I’m excited to read and imagine it all. To talk about colors, textures, and smells. It’s awesome.”

There is something about the old-time charm of the hotline that resonates with listeners. “There’s something deeply grounding about the corporeal nature of the hotline,” Chaves agrees. That grounding comes from Henschel’s personal elation and vocal delivery. Chaves goes further, saying, “The literal sound of it is meditative. I think it’s also the reason why some people listen to NPR.” Listening to the recordings as a purely audio artifact is reason enough to tune in. Henschel tells me that a TPF staffer’s sister, who had moved to Helsinki, would listen in to feel “at home and grounded in California” while living abroad. “I have no idea who’s listening, but I know if they’re listening, it’s meaningful to them,” he says with conviction.

But the Theodore Payne Foundation does know who listens. On a phone call, Chaves—who worked at TPF from 2011 to 2023—explained that the hotline did go through a change in listenership during the pandemic. No longer was it just a niche report for botanists and nerdy hikers, but it took on a more culturally visible role. He attributes this to the rise in people wanting to get out of their homes and have “low-risk” outdoor adventures. The reset of the lockdown era, coupled with an ongoing online malaise many people are experiencing today, speaks to the renewed interest in the hotline’s, for lack of a better word, purity. “Everybody lives in a world of urgency. The hotline is there to help people be mindful, slow down, and notice a flower on the side of the freeway,” Chaves says.

One of these newer post-pandemic listeners is Sara Seidman, a millennial Angeleno who has become a Wild Flower Hotline devotee. She’s artistic and has niche interests—someone who reads Atlas Obscura to find places off, off, off the beaten path. It’s a sensibility that fits Los Angeles’ driving culture, especially for someone with a bumper sticker that reads: “Keep Honking! I’m Listening to the Wild Flower Hotline.”

Of the hotline, she says, “It’s very calm and soothing. There is a low-key excitement about these small flowers that you can see on the side of the road.” Seidman has learned a great deal about native plants: where to find them near her home and how to pronounce many of them (some are quite the mouthful). But she stresses, “It’s not just information; it’s an invitation. An invitation to explore,” she says on a call.

LA residents exploring flora in their own backyards is exactly what Wild Flower Hotline writer Lorrae Fuentes has in mind when penning her weekly botanical wrap-up. A botanist, educator, and member of the California Native Plant Society, Fuentes has been writing the hotline reports since 2011. She is evangelical about finding natural beauty in Southern California’s most unlikely places, from backyard gardens to the marshlands around LAX, which serve as butterfly habitat. “The natural history is right there in their urban area. They don’t have to go far,” she says.

For Fuentes, the work that TPF and the Wild Flower Hotline take on is not just informational, but existential as well. In her writing, Fuentes strives to preserve the breathtaking and complicated landscape of California for future generations. “Climate change is a threat. People think it’s happening so slowly, but they’re not really engaged in conservation or what climate change really is,” she warns.

Fuentes pointed to this spring as a vivid example: early March brought a wave of reports about unusually early blooms in warm weather, only for a sudden heatwave and lack of rain to dry out areas just weeks later. That close attention to small environmental changes, drawn from weekly reports and anecdotes she gathers, makes the hotline a kind of microcosm of larger ecological volatility.

The devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, along with government layoffs and cuts to parks and ecological programs—areas the current administration appears intent on stripping back—made 2025 a difficult year for California ecology as well as for the hotline. Tilford explains that many of those who contribute reports are national and state park employees; without staff in the field during peak bloom season, those observations simply don’t come in, leaving noticeable gaps in the hotline’s weekly record.

Zooming out, Tilford notes a persistent misunderstanding: that nature is self-sustaining, requiring no human care. In reality, she says, people have been cultivating and tending landscapes since the dawn of history, and that work remains essential rather than optional.

With the administration spending vast sums on “war, police, and ICE,” Tilford adds, “The money that is being asked for parks and open space is so minuscule. But the rewards we get back from it are immeasurable and priceless.”

Even as those pressures accumulate—fires reshaping landscapes, funding gaps limiting what can be recorded—the hotline continues its quiet work of translating ecological disruption into something individuals can actually perceive. The report is a weekly reminder that landscapes are changing, but not absent; damaged, but not silent.

For Seidman, that reminder became tangible on a drive to Figueroa Mountain in Santa Barbara County, a place she had first discovered through the Wild Flower Hotline. The area had burned in a 2024 fire, but a recent report noted it had reopened to the public. “It was so cool to listen to the hotline and see all the wildflowers that were coming back,” she says.

Driving through, she encountered not just a landscape marked by fire, but one quietly returning to life.