Plants, birds, minerals color Las Vegas beyond the flashy lights

At first glance, Las Vegas is a dirt-brown moonscape broken by a single strip of overwhelming glare. But beautiful color is not hard to find off the Strip, if you're willing to look.

Every spring, wildflowers explode their ravishing hues across most of our valley's unpaved parcels. Some of the most common and spectacular are the violet Phacelia crenulata, the magenta Beavertail prickly pear and the orange desert globemallow.

According to Von Winkel, restoration ecologist with the Springs Preserve, wildflower "events" occur approximately two years every decade, depending on soil moisture content. (They start in mid-February in Death Valley and snake like dominoes up to our higher elevation by early March.) Thanks to nearly two inches of rainfall over 10 days last month, 2011 could be one of those years, Winkel says, if we get another rain or two.

If deep greens are more your thing, even the short hike up Mount Charleston is unnecessary. Trees and shrubs crowd like thirsty travelers above what's left of the springs that once gave Las Vegas its name ("the meadows," in Spanish).

While the Las Vegas Creek -- which flowed from the Springs Preserve down to the Mormon Fort -- was tapped dry by our predecessors, natural water still trickles under Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs, Sunset Park, Kyle Ranch Historic Site in North Las Vegas, and other man-preserved oases lush with Mesquite, cottonwood and catclaw acacia (trees and shrubs that also add bright yellow to the desert palate before dropping their leaves every fall).

And although the Las Vegas Wash is mostly artificial, according to Winkel, its Wetlands Park has become a de facto marine ecosystem with deep green and purple aquatic vegetation, as well as thirsty avian visitors including the scarlet ibis, yellow-headed blackbird and green heron.

Even our mountains themselves are not as monochromatic as they seem.

"You think that they're brown, but if you step out of your car, you can find an amazing amount of minerals that range in color from bright green to yellows to oranges," says Las Vegas sculptor and multimedia artist David Sanchez Burr, much of whose work is inspired by formations on Sunrise Mountain.

If the valley does suffer from a color monotony, it's not natural desert brown but man-made beige stucco and clay tile. Thankfully, we're emerging from that rut. (And no, this is not a reference to the pink 702-TRAFFIC house on Flamingo Road and Rainbow Boulevard.)

"One of the biggest changes that happened in the Las Vegas Valley to get us to be more color-directed is Summerlin," says interior designer Leslie Parraguirre of Colours Inc., who lauds mauve-walled Summerlin subdivisions such as Eagle Hills, The Trails and The Ridges for leading a tasteful deviation from the Taco Bell template.

"So many homes, whether they're tract or custom, go real deep with reds, periwinkle blues and other nature-based colors," Parraguirre says.

"It's more of a celebration of being in the desert than a denial of it."

Contact reporter Corey Levitan at clevitan@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0456.