[ Lost in the Landscape ]

spring in plum canyon

Two weeks ago I joined the local CNPS chap­ter for a trip out to Anza Bor­rego Desert State Park with botan­i­cal wiz­ard, Larry Hen­drick­son. Our des­ti­na­tion was Plum Canyon, one of the rocky canyons that drains the east­ern face of San Diego County’s Laguna Moun­tains. Spring wild­flow­ers were close to their peak, and Larry knew ‘em all, includ­ing a sight­ing of an Ari­zona plant that hadn’t yet been described in California.

This first plant is the species that gives the canyon its name. Well, you’d guess it’s some sort of plum, but the com­mon name of Prunus fre­mon­tii is actu­ally “desert apri­cot.” Plum, apricot…close enough.

I went a lit­tle crazy with the cam­era, and below are some of that crazi­ness. (I think I got all the IDs cor­rect on these, but if I missed a few, let me know!)

Desert sun is your first impres­sion, but plants were every­where, bloom­ing and not.

Sub­tly col­ored, pow­er­fully scented: Desert laven­der, Hyp­tis emoryi. This com­mon plant is in the mint family–It helps explain its intense aroma when­ever you touch the plant.

Near the desert laven­der, Trixis cal­i­for­nica.

Sub­tle dark blue-violet flow­ers of Indigo bush Parry Dalea, Psorotham­nus Marina par­ryi. (Thanks to jim­rob and Larry Hen­drick­son for the cor­rec­tion here!)

A very cool spurge, Chamaesyce poly­carpa.

One of the things you notice is that the plants often grow in the com­pany of other plants, sep­a­rated by expanses of sharp shards of decom­posed moun­tain­side. It’s not a look that peo­ple gen­er­ally cul­ti­vate in their gar­dens but it makes sense here. Larger plants help pro­vide shel­ter to seedlings. I’d also guess that more seeds end up caught up in the low branches of shrubs than they do in the bare earth with rain beat­ing down on them. The effect is a bit of an enthu­si­as­tic jum­ble of plants.

Speak­ing of garden-worthy plant com­bi­na­tions, I thought this com­po­si­tion of pale and silver-leaved plants and stems was a del­i­cate mix of con­trast­ing scale and textures.

Spring­time in the desert means belly flow­ers galore…

A mile up the canyon, as you gain a lti­tle alti­tude, the Cal­i­for­nia junipers start up.

Many were going crazy with the juniper berries.

And a cou­ple junipers had this bug. I’m really bad with my insects, so I’m just call­ing this a juniper bug. I’m sure it’s got a real name… Edit (March 28): Thanks to Katie for this bug ID: This crit­ter def­i­nitely looks like a west­ern leaf-footed bug.

On the way home, climb­ing out of the desert, two differently-colored species of cean­othus pro­vided spots of color along the sharp curves of Ban­ner Grade. The laven­der one was our fairly wide­spread C. tomen­to­sus. But what was the white one? My car­load of plant peo­ple just couldn’t stand not know­ing. We had to stop and do a quick ID.

The slightly cupped leaves helped us iden­tify this plant as Cean­othus greggi ssp. var. per­plex­ans. Although known as “desert cean­othus” the plant didn’t get pro­lific until we started climb­ing near the 3,000 foot level.

This final photo is the plant in the land­scape. How could we not stop for a closer look?

March 27 2011 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park • desert plants • native plants • Plum Canyon | 15 Comments »

desert agave

A cou­ple week­ends ago Agave deserti was look­ing well-watered from the win­ter rains. This swirling mass of plants appeared to have nom­i­nated one of the clus­ter to go forth and flower.

Flow­er­ing is a big deal for these plants. The stalk will rise up some­thing like ten feet from the plants cen­tral growth point. When they start out the stalks take on this gor­geous pink and green col­oration, which con­trasts against the nearly white rosettes of the main plants.

I couldn’t help myself from get­ting a lit­tle abstract and arty with this extreme crop­ping of this closeup. It’s really such a neat phe­nom­e­non that you can appre­ci­ate all sorts of ways.

Once it blooms the main growth point dies. Crit­ters rel­ish the seed, so these don’t always get a chance to repro­duce that way. For­tu­nately they have the fall­back of throw­ing one or more pups from the base of the plant. Once a plant has bloomed and pupped a few times you can get a strik­ing group­ing of genet­i­cally iden­ti­cal plants called a genet. The first photo of this post is a nice example.

The plants were all over the slopes of Plum Canyon at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. But occa­sion­ally you’d see the agaves set­ting up house­hold in unlikely places, like this rock cleft. It makes for a nice photo though I’m not so sure about what it bodes for a life­time anchored in this one spot. The plants didn’t appear any too con­cerned, however.

I leave you with a closeup of a sin­gle plant of a larger genet. Wikipedia says that a sin­gle indi­vid­ual out of a genet is called a ramet. I learn some­thing new every day.

Although many agaves grow in per­fect, implaca­ble rosettes, so that you can almost see a math­e­mat­i­cal purity in their pat­terns, the desert agave seems to cel­e­brate a looser, wilder approach to life. You can almost envi­sion a vor­tex of desert wind blow­ing just look­ing at these leaves.

All in all a gor­geous species!

I’ll have more desert plant pho­tos as I work through the files on my camera…

March 22 2011 | Categories: places • plant profiles | Tags: Agave deserti • Anza-Borrego Desert State Park • Desert Agave • genets • native plants • Plum Canyon • ramets | 3 Comments »

the desert blooms

Week­end before last I took a trip out to the Tierra Blanca Moun­tains on the south­west­ern edge of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park on a trip orga­nized by the San Diego Chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Society.

This was a trip that offered lots of up-close flower view­ing. After sev­eral months with good rain­fall many of us were hop­ing for car­pets of bloom­ing desert flow­ers spread­ing out in every direc­tion. But the rains didn’t begin until the end of fall. The flo­ral dis­play was good, with flow­ers easy to find in all direc­tions, but it wasn’t the gonzo hundred-year bloom that we’d hoped for. Botanist Larry Hen­drick­son, who led the out­ing, started out think­ing this was close to an aver­age year. But we found the lit­tle yel­low twin­ing desert snap­dragon in sev­eral loca­tions, and its sight­ing made him revise his eval­u­a­tion of the year to better-than average.

The splashiest flower was wild heliotrope, Phacelia dis­tans. If you saw a car­pet of pur­ple, it was most likely this plant.

Last post I men­tioned my dis­com­fort with cer­tain plant names, includ­ing those that begin with the epi­thet “Indian.” Dunno. Maybe I’m being too sensitive.

Well, one of the canyons we explored was named “Indian Canyon.” Chang­ing plant names and geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions seems to take about as much time. This canyon is one of the more north­ern exten­sions of the ele­phant tree or torote (Burs­era micro­phylla).

A fern in the desert, always a sur­prise. I think this is Cheilan­thes par­ryi.

The flow­ers were mainly small species. Look­ing up the hill­side the impres­sion is mainly of white rock relieved by tall wands of ocotillos.

What’s the best way to bring relief to a day in the desert? Maybe water?

We ended up in a stream that sup­ported a chain of lit­tle palm oases of the Cal­i­for­nia fan palm (Wash­ing­to­nia fil­if­era). These trees had been burned in the past. This was maybe an acci­dent, but in the past the Native Amer­i­cans were known to burn the fronds to get eas­ier access to the dates. Appar­ently it doesn’t seri­ously dam­age the plant.

Nearby these palms escaped the fire and flaunted long skirts of dried fronds. Liv­ing in sub­ur­bia peo­ple prune the dead fronds off what­ever palm species they grow, and you almost never see this gor­geous effect of decades of fronds sheath­ing the trunk. Maybe they’re afraid that it’ll be habi­tat for crea­tures they’d rather not have. Still, it’s a great effect, don’t you think?

March 23 2010 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park • desert plants • native plants | 14 Comments »