AUSTIN, Texas — Deep in the heart of Texas people look forward to the bluebonnets blooming every spring, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is predicting the 2024 wildflower season to be a “banner year of blooms.”

Experts at the center, on a scale of one to 10, are predicting this year to be an eight for Texas wildflowers in general, but especially for bluebonnets. 

Andrea DeLong-Amaya, the center’s director of horticulture, said in a news release that the 2023 drought will likely boost this year’s wildflower season, and her colleagues agreed.

“Last summer’s drought likely helped this spring’s wildflower display,” said Matt O’Toole, director of land management for the center. “When we have extreme weather the prior summer, we see some plant mortality, which reduces competition in the soil and creates space for spring blooming wildflowers.”

Not only is last year’s drought a net positive for this year’s wildflowers, but also the amount of rain in the past few months could increase the amount of flowers. 

“This fall and winter we’ve enjoyed adequate rainfall that’s been well-spaced, which is really key to wildflower development,” DeLong-Amaya said in the release. 

At the Wildflower Center, which is a part of the University of Texas at Austin, some of the perennials are already blooming, like golden groundsells and large buttercups. 

Now, it’s often hard to predict the exact timing of when the bluebonnets start blooming, but the easy answer is early April. Austin and most of Central Texas is part of the “bluebonnet belt,” where a large number of bluebonnets bloom. In this region, the state flowers tend to start coming out toward the end of March through mid-to-late April. 

Along with the wildflower season predictions, the center also announced its 2024 Wildflower of the Year, the rock rose, which is a small shrub found on limestone or other rocky places.