Desert Wildflower Mysteries...

These photos are of some beauties that I was unable to identify. If anyone knows what these are, please leave a comment with the information...

Assortments...

I took these photos at various places on the desert floor yesterday. They each show multiple species, which I won't elaborate on here (as I did in other posts). Multi-species displays like these are common, everywhere we walked; they're really the norm. The single-species displays are much less common...

Desert Sand Verbena...

When most people talk about the desert wildflowers, the Desert Sand Verbena (Abronia villosa), or just Sand Verbena, is what they're thinking of. I like the Sand Verbena, but it's far from my favorite wildflower – and I actually prefer it when individual plants are on display, rather than the verbena carpets that appear in some areas – such as further north, especially around Borrego Springs, where many acres of desert floor are covered with verbena after a good rain. Down in the southern part of the park it's not quite so abundant, but there's plenty of it nonetheless. We found the best displays about a mile and a half east of S-2 on South Carrizo Creek Road (4WD), in an area with a relatively large, flat expanse of sandy wash.

As its name implies, the Sand Verbena likes to live on sand. Because shoulders of paved roads in the desert are often made of sand, it is frequently found there. Any sandy desert wash is also prime territory for it. The Sand Verbena's leaves are covered with fine, short, and very sticky hairs. In the photo above, you can see the individual sand grains sticking tightly to the hairs. There must be some advantage conveyed by the sand, or evolution wouldn't have favored it (producing the sticky stuff must incur a cost). Perhaps the sand helps weigh the leaf down, making it better able to survive windy periods? Or perhaps the sand helps keep the plant cool?

Parish's Poppy...

The little Parish's Poppy (Eschscholzia parishii) is one of the most cheerful flowers you'll find out on the desert. It's sometimes called Parish's Gold Poppy or just Gold Poppy, for obvious reasons. We found at least a few of these almost everywhere we stopped on the desert floor, but they were by far the best near the bottom of the little hidden canyon I've described in an earlier post, just south of the much better known Box Canyon. There we found scattered clumps of the Parish's Poppy, with their unstoppably cheerful blooms shining on sand washes, alongside rocks, and even out of the cracks in a boulder.

They are also fairly common on the Carrizo Badlands Overlook and on the plains just to the south of it. There we most commonly found them alongside a rock or in a patch of sand amongst the gravel...

Desert Lupine...

The Carrizo Badlands Overlook (and its immediate surrounds) is the place to go for the beautiful Desert Lupine (Lupinus sparsiflorus). On the hilltop right at the overlook, and on the east side of the road on both sides of it, these lupine grow by the tens of thousands.

Yesterday it was a bit early in the season to catch the lupine. Relatively few plants are in bloom (but even then there were thousands of them), but their color is particularly fresh and vibrant. If you visit a stand over the course of a few weeks, you'll see the colors change subtley over time as the sun fades them – they get less saturated, more purely blue, and less even.

As we walked around on the overlook, we could see that there were 10 or 20 lupine plants too young to bloom for each one that was in bloom. The plants are easy to spot because of their characteristic palmate leaves and their deep green color. My guess is that in a couple of weeks there will be a sea of lupine there (and I will be back to visit them!).

In past years that were good for wildflowers, the overlook area provided by far the most sumptuous displays in the southern Anza Borrego (at least, that I ever saw). The lupine were the centerpiece, but there are also several hillsides there that can be saturated with the yellows, whites, and blues of other desert wildflowers. If for some sad reason I was restricted to visiting only one site in the southern Anza Borrego, the Carrizo Badlands Overlook would be it...

Fish-Hook Cactus...

The fish-hook or strawberry cactus (Mammillaria dioica) is my favorite of all the cacti in the Anza Borrego. My best explanation for this: they're cute! They are small (under a foot tall and just two or three inches in diameter), furry-looking (until you get close enough to see the stout, sharp spines!), and colorful. They seem to like best areas that are protected by immediately adjacent rocks and boulders, and this leads to some very picturesque settings for them.

They're also mainly confined to specific areas. On our trip yesterday, we only saw them in one place – a small canyon just east of S-2 and just south of Box Canyon. There's a short, unmarked dirt road (perhaps 100 yards long, safe for 2WD) that leads to a small clearing and a place to park. The only sign is a small, brown sign declaring this a wilderness area. If you didn't know the canyon was there, you'd think there was nothing to see – most of the “good stuff” is just around the corner. There is a vague trail that runs up the canyon floor, but it really doesn't matter where you walk.

The sand and gravel wash at the very bottom form a distinct micro-environment, with its own flora. If you look carefully as you walk, you'll be able to identify other such micro-environments as well. Nearly every plant has some special place that it likes to grow. For instance, the large barrel cacti seem to like steep, stony slopes the best. The teddy bear cholla grows most often on slightly exposed, slightly higher places. You'll find Chuparosa in sandy washes. In a place like this little canyon there may be dozens of such micro-environments, each with its characteristic set of species...

Here's my photos from yesterday. As always, click on these images to see a larger version:

Desert Dandelion...

We saw the desert dandelion (Malacothrix californica) in many places yesterday, sometimes in profusion (especially near the Carrizo Badlands Overlook) and sometimes just a few plants. It's another member of the sunflower family (Asteraceae).

The common names for this plant are interesting. The common English name that most of us know is, of course, “dandelion” – which is a corruption of the French dent de lion, or “lion's tooth”, referring to the deeply toothed leaves. The French common name, on the other hand (according to Wikipedia), is “pissenlit”, which means “urinate in bed”, referring to the plant's diuretic properties. Read the Wikipedia entry for even more...

Desert Chicory...

The desert chicory (Rafinesquia neomexicana) is a member of the sunflower family (Asteraceae), and is quite common in many places in the Anza Borrego desert. We saw them yesterday on every stop we made down on the desert floor, including in the lower reaches of the Oriflamme Canyon.

Sometimes you can find a splash of white across the desert floor, comprised of hundreds of desert chicory blooms. But my favorite display of them is when a solitary plant shows its cheerful little blossom in some out-of-the-way, unlikely, hostile-looking place. The desert chicory strikes me as a plucky little fighter that's happy to go live where most other plants fail...

Creosote Bush...

The creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) is not a plant that excites most people. It's the most common shrub in our desert, generally looks pretty ratty, has small and inconspicuous flowers that don't smell good, and little tiny green leaves that leave an oily smear on your fingers or clothes if you brush up against it. If you crush the leaves, it smells vaguely of creosote. I'd read that if you create some humid air around its leaves by cupping your hands around a twig and blowing into them, you'll smell the wonderful aroma of rain on the desert. I tried it, and I think people are smoking something they shouldn't oughtta be – smells like a combination of stale breath and creosote to me.

But there really are some interesting things about the creosote bush. For starters, the individual plants live a very long time for a shrub: 100 to 200 years, possibly more. They produce lots and lots of seeds, but the germination rate is very low. Most of the individual plants are actually clones. It works like this: a single ancestral plant germinates from windblown or bird-carried seed, far from any other creosote bushes. That plant grows for a hundred years or so, gradually increasing in diameter, with the younger shoots on the outside.

Eventually the inner, older shoots die off, leaving a ring-shaped shrub. These are rare, but they do exist – I've seen four or five over the years. These rings gradually increase in size by the same mechanism, until (I've read) they are something like 20 to 50 feet in diameter. The biggest one I've ever seen was only about 6 feet in diameter, with about a 4 foot in diameter “dead zone” in the middle.

The scarcest resource for these plants is water; the creosote bush grows an extensive network of fine roots close to the surface to capture as much water as it can. If there is a ring of creosote plants that are (say) 20 feet in diameter, there's much more opportunity to capture water outside the ring than there is inside the ring – so more new shoots propagate in that direction. As the ring gets bigger and bigger, over thousands and even tens of thousands of years, they tend to leave fairly regularly-spaced individuals in the middle, with the spacing determined by the available rainfall. All of these individual plants are genetic clones, and taken together, there are some colonies that are on the order of 10,000 to 15,000 years old – and over a mile in diameter!

Another interesting fact about the creosote bush is probably mainly driven by how common it is, and how many flowers it has. There are at least 22 species of bees that specialize in feeding from the nectar and pollen of the creosote bush. These bees won't visit the flowers of any other plant. I can't identify any of them, but there's a very good chance that the bee I captured in the photo above is one of those 22 species...

Chuparosa...

Chuparosa (Beloperone californica) is a very odd plant. It's a member of the tropical Acanthus family (Acanthaceae), the only one that grows naturally this far north. Most individual plants have no leaves at all, and when they do have leaves (as in the plant photographed at right), they're little teeny things that you have to look closely to find. The common name means “sucking rose” in Spanish, a reference to the abundant nectar produced by the blossoms. Hummingbirds love this thing.

Over the years, on previous visits to the desert, I've probably snapped twenty photos of chuparosa. Not one of them turned out any better than you'd expect from a drunken sailor distracted by naked dancing girls. And no, I wasn't drunk and there were no naked dancing girls (darn it!). Yesterday I took eight chuparosa photos, and this was the only one that looked good (click on it to see a larger version). I'm happy to finally get one that I'm happy with!

Sunday Steyn...

Mark Steyn has this marvelous talent for discovering new perspectives on politics and the state of the planet, and then teaching us about it while simultaneously inducing belly laughs and cracked faces from prolonged over-stretched grinning. He can do this even when the perspective is painful – as Mary Poppins said: “Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way!”

Except Mr. Steyn delivers the sugar by the truckload.

To a political junkie like myself, today's column is one of the funniest I have ever read. I read some parts of it four or five times, just to savor the wit on display. Here's one passage, just to tease you:

The Democratic primary season seems to have dwindled down into a psycho remake of “Driving Miss Daisy.” The fading matriarch Mizz Hill'ry (Jessica Tandy) doesn't want to give up the keys to the Democratic Party vehicle but the dignified black chauffeur Hokey (Morgan Freeman) insists it'll be a much smoother ride with him in the driver's seat. Yet, just as he thinks the old biddy's resigned to a nomination as Best Supporting Actress, the backseat driver plunges her hat pin into his spine, wrests the wheel away and lurches across the median.

...but really, you don't want to miss the whole darned thing!

Blue Phacelia...

The blue phacelia (Phacelia distans) was a particular treat for us this year. It's very common in many places in Anza Borrego, usually found growing up through a shrub (presumably taking advantage of the shade there). This year it is particularly abundant, and in places where we've not seen it before. We found at least some of it at nearly every stop we made yesterday. However, in the approaches to, and in the lower reaches of, Oriflamme Canyon there were awesome displays of it. Probably the very best was about a half mile from S-2 on Oriflamme Canyon Road. We also saw some very nice displays just south of the Carrizo Badlands Overlook, just a short walk from S-2.