Lack of blooms casts a pall over Lotus Festival - A cold winter and spring plus a lack of rain are blamed for the poor crop for Echo Park's annual celebration.

With year-round fire season and record low rainfall, Los Angeles is, without a doubt, one hot place.

But memories of winter's cold snaps linger. The freezes of January that resulted in crop losses for farmers and blanketed Malibu in snow also gave the lotus plants at Echo Park cold feet.

For decades, the lotus bed at the northern end of the park's lake was near full bloom at this time of year, just in time for the July 13-15 Lotus Festival that always takes place on the second weekend of this month.

But this year and last, because of the extremely cold winter and spring, the growth of the warm-weather plants was stunted and delayed, said David Foster, gardener and caretaker of Echo Park.

"We had a prolonged period of really cold weather, around 30 degrees and under, for multiple days in a row," Foster said. "For downtown L.A., that's a bit abnormal."

Only about 30 lotus blooms are scattered against the lake's bank, hugging its sides; typically at this time of year, there are hundreds of blooms, grandly rising out of the water and across the small cove in the northern corner of the 15-acre lake. Concrete below the plants holds them in about 3 feet of water, while the rest of the lake is about 8 feet deep.

Since 1972, the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks has held the Lotus Festival at Echo Park not only because of the lotuses but because of the park's proximity to the Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown and Filipino communities.

According to legend, the lotuses were introduced to the lake in the 1920s by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who collected them on a missionary trip conducted by her Angelus Temple, across the street from the park.

The dearth of lotus blooms seems to be more severe than this time last year, said neighbors, who estimated that there were up to three times more flowers in 2006.

Thomas DeBoe, chairman of the Echo Park Advisory Board, said the petals are falling off the existing blooms. Several local plant specialists have examined the flowers, DeBoe said, and the board is trying to call in a city botanist to investigate the flowers' slow growth.

"Everybody is really concerned about it," DeBoe said, adding that this is the first year he has seen so few blossoms. "Right now, it's just a little strip; that whole area should be covered with lotus."