A natural gas along the freeway

But in case you are among the approximately 299,750 drivers who travel the stretch of Santa Monica Freeway between the 405 and the 110 each weekday and have been so taken by what Rush Limbaugh or Larry Mantle have to say that you failed to notice the joyful colonization of the median by all manner of flower and shrub, here is a little jab in the ribs:

In the most unlikely place, proof of our lush late spring has presented itself.

Amid the discarded plastic bags and other flotsam of the freeway corridor, it's refreshing to spy the telltale yellow of a dandelion flower or a tree sapling that's already 2 feet high. Somewhere east of Crenshaw, there's a whole clump of daisies and an incipient stand of bamboo. Weird? Perhaps, but certainly no weirder than anything else you see on roadways these days: trucks with brass testicles hanging below their license plates, women risking blindness to apply mascara while driving, etc.

There is something delightful about whizzing down the freeway at 70 mph (or better yet, stuck at a bumper-to-bumper pace) and noticing that on a stretch of pavement not meant for carbon-based life forms, plants are reaching with tender green shoots toward the sky, scrawny little flowers are blooming and small stands of grasses are blowing about as if they were miniature Kansas cornfields.

The embankments, by contrast, which nestle the freeway between their banks, are planted and watered. And so you might expect to see the volunteer patch of brilliant orange and yellow nasturtiums that are currently lighting up the southern slope near the Arlington Avenue exit.

But you do not expect to see plants on the hostile median, right in the crack where the asphalt and the concrete "New Jersey median barriers" (that's the technical term; they should just call them ugly) form a 90-degree angle. Not in a spot where there is no soil, almost no water and certainly a dearth of fresh air. (Special exception: the ubiquitous Mexican fan palms, the indestructible cockroach of Southern California freeway flora.)

Botanists, if not exactly agog, are somewhat enthusiastic. Caltrans, on the other hand, is slightly concerned.