California Chocolate Lily (Fritillaria biflora)

California Chocolate Lily
Fritillaria biflora

California Chocolate Lily. Rare and endangered due to urban sprawl.

Photographed in Mission Trails Regional Park, San Diego, in March. The flowers really are the color of a chocolate bar and bloom in early spring if and when there has been sufficient rain. Urban sprawl has unfortunately covered most of their habitat with asphalt and houses.

Hi WalterT! I live in Klamath Falls, and we have a very small member of this flower that blooms in the spring. It is about 2" tall with a yellow flower. I think it is F. pudica, but the descriptions say it is much taller than any I've seen around here. It might just be difference of geographic location, as things to the west of the Klamath basin tend to grow larger due to more moisture. But I digress. My dad grew up in the siskiyou mountains on the Cal/Or border, and he always spoke of a flower there that he called "red-bells". Nobody on this side of the mountains knew what he was talking about, as it sounded so exotic for this area. One day my dad and I where driving thru the mountains west of here and I spotted a bright-red lily-like flower growing on the top of a road-cut. I ask my dad if it might be the fabled "red-bells" and from my brief description, he decided to turn the car around and see (he hadn't seen one since he was a kid-60+ years ago). I climbed up to the top of the road-cut and sliced the stalk off with a pocket-knife. When I brought it to my dad, he just LIT-UP!" YES! YES! Those are "red-bells". It was like proving the existance of Bigfoot. We took pictures of it laying in the back of the stationwagon on a piece of plywood for contrast. The flowers were fascinating. The outside was a bright reddish-orange, but the inside was a "checker-board" pattern of red and yellow. I had seen similar patterns on the outside of flowers in bulb magazines when I was a kid and always wondered how such a pattern could exist on a plant. Now I had seen it in person. Anyway as I digress again, The chocolate fritillary you show look almost exactly like the "red-bells" except the color. I later found out that the "red-bells" are also listed as endangered, but they don't know exactly what they are. The studies seem to show that they very rarely produce from seed ( thank god , because I might have cut down the only flowering stalk within 100 miles!) They seem to reprduce mainly by bulblets and the flowers seem to be sterile- meaning they could be a natural cross between several differnt species and are not able to reproduce from seed. Anyway, thanks for the picture that brought back memmories.

Hi KFJ: I've been thru' KF many times over the years but being a native Californian the climate is too rough for me.....
Glad you enjoyed my image of the Chocolate Lily. It is a spectacular flower for sure.
As for the Red Bells plant in the Siskiyous, I suggest you go to CalFlora to find and identify it. Good Luck! WalterT

I imagine the red bells were Fritillaria recurva ssp. gentneri
There has been some research on how to grow them from seed and replant them, and are now fairly well documented.