[ Lost in the Landscape ]

desert plants… in the desert

Let me start with a piece of advice: New hik­ing boots plus old, thin socks can be a painful combination!

Yes­ter­day I tagged along with a group of hik­ers that I’d done a trip with a cou­ple years ago. The des­ti­na­tion this time was a clus­ter of four sur­vey bench­marks along the U.S.-Mexican bor­der. One of them appeared on the map as “Ben­nie.” The oth­ers quickly got tagged as “the Jets,” after the old Elton John song.

Some hik­ers pre­fer leisurely strolls over flat, care­fully main­tained paths. This group isn’t made up of any of that vari­ety. At one point on the hike, while we were cross­ing a broad, flat, sandy val­ley, one of the core mem­bers apol­o­gized to me. “Our hikes are are usu­ally a lot more uphill than this.”

That was what I rec­ol­lected from the last trip I’d taken with the group. But I’m not in the same con­di­tion that I was for that ear­lier hike. Yes­ter­day, thir­teen and a half miles of travel–which included climb­ing up the slick face of a dry water­fall, two stubbed toes and five blis­ters on my feet–was adven­ture enough for me!

Here are some of the hik­ers, includ­ing Para­sol Patsy, who set a high stan­dard of look­ing cool and casual in the wilds.

Say “desert” to any­one and they’ll prob­a­bly think of cac­tus. This is the Cal­i­for­nia bar­rel cac­tus, Fero­cac­tus cylin­draceus. It proved to be a com­mon pres­ence all along the trip when­ever we climbed above the dry stream beds.

The next image shows the hill­side ter­rain, com­plete with bar­rel cac­tus, cholla cac­tus (Cylin­drop­un­tia sp., in the cen­ter, front), and–most dra­matic to the left–ocotillo, Fouquieria splen­dens. Almost any­one who has hiked in these areas knows that a com­mon name for some cholla cac­tus species is “jump­ing cholla,” a piece of urban leg­end deriv­ing from the fact that the plants can break apart into lit­tle bits any­time any­one as much as touches the plant. The lit­tle barbs hold on to your cloth­ing or your skin and work them­selves into your clothes or your skin, tak­ing a piece of the plant with them. It only looks like they jump. (Any­one look­ing for an idea for a hor­ror movie?)

The ocotil­los were leaf­ing out, a sure sign that it’s rained in the area recently. The plants can grow and shed their leaves sev­eral times each year in response to rain­fall. Some were devel­op­ing buds at the ends of their stems in prepa­ra­tion for the out­ra­geous flow­er­ings of tubu­lar orange-red blooms that these plants are capa­ble of.

Another sure sign of recent rains was this mas­sive desert lake, in the heart of Davies Val­ley. Few plants grew in the imme­di­ate area, let­ting you know that these desert plants pre­fer occa­sional sprin­kles of water rather than wal­low­ing in it.

This being the desert, signs of lack of water were all around…

A trip to this area gives you the feel­ing that the bor­der between the U.S. and Mex­ico is a purely arbi­trary one. Gosh, there isn’t even a wel­come sign or a bor­der fence in these parts. How rude.

These are two views into Mex­ico from the promon­to­ries we climbed on the trip. Occa­sional pieces of dis­carded cloth­ing, aban­doned empty water bot­tles and–weirdly–a fry­ing pan let you know that this was an area that was used for bor­der cross­ings. On this late-December day tem­per­a­tures reached the mid-sixties, per­fect hik­ing weather. Bor­der cross­ings done at other times of the year, when the tem­per­a­tures would be over 110, would prove a lot more dangerous.

Any trip to the bor­der regions isn’t com­plete with­out an encounter with the U.S. Bor­der Patrol. This was out first con­tact, a fly­over by an agency heli­copter. Later, at the end of the hike, as we were pack­ing up our cars, we were vis­ited by agents in two SUVs. For offi­cers who don’t know what to do with the desert it must be a dusty, tedious job. I like to think that attend­ing to a group of tired hik­ers was a fun break in their routine.

The visit by the Bor­der Patrol was a fit­ting end to the trip. This only looked like a trek through unspoiled wilder­ness. The truth is that this is an area that’s com­plex with polit­i­cal intrigue and his­tory, and where the ten­sions of eco­nomic sur­vival coin­cide with issues of basic human endurance and survival.

I try hard to find land­scapes that to me feel pure and untouched by the ways of human­ity. But a trip like this tells you that such a place doesn’t exist.

December 30 2008 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: cholla cactus • Cylindropuntia • desert plants • deserts • Ferocactus cylindraceus • Fouquieria splendens • hiking • immigration • native plants • ocotillos • politics • U.S.-Mexico border • water | 4 Comments »

in bloom: this big aloe

Sorry. I don’t know the species, but it’s for sure an aloe, pos­si­bly Aloe arborescens. It’s pretty com­mon in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia but spec­tac­u­lar nev­er­the­less, espe­cially in bloom:




This is the plant in the front yard. It’s now mound­ing some­thing like 6 feet tall and maybe 8 wide, and cov­ered with these tall spires of coral-orange-red flow­ers. You can eas­ily for­get that there are other things bloom­ing.




Like other aloes, it orig­i­nates in South­ern Africa, if not South Africa proper. It left a Mediter­ranean cli­mate sim­i­lar to California’s, and thrives on the warm, dry sum­mers and cool, moister win­ters. Some sum­mers it endures more than a month with no sup­ple­men­tal water, and it’d sur­vive just fine if it didn’t get half of how much it gets. But like many things it responds to a lit­tle coax­ing, and with a lit­tle water looks a lit­tle less feral.

There’s a def­i­nite hier­ar­chy among some ecologically-concerned though a lit­tle purist gar­den­ers. Fake Eng­lish coun­try gar­dens that in the desert that is Cal­i­for­nia require lots of water and are filled with overfed dis­pos­able plants bloom­ing them­selves to death are near the dregs of the dregs at the bot­tom of the list. Drought-tolerant land­scap­ing rises lots higher. And in the high­est regard are the drought-tolerant gar­dens that rely solely on native plants. So this aloe is a middle-of-the-road choice in social con­scious­ness. If it were human it’d prob­a­bly drive a Sub­aru and vote for fairly pro­gres­sive causes, though it might be caught throw­ing recy­clables out with the land­fill trash or lis­ten­ing to Howard Stern.

It’s inter­est­ing that a plant can have been in cul­ti­va­tion here for a cen­tury or more and still be con­sid­ered an exotic species. Human ances­tors that might have brought the plant with them would now be long-gone, though their prog­eny could be con­sid­ered native to wher­ever they were born. Biol­ogy, though, has a much longer mem­ory, and with good reason.

Some of these species brought over from other places could take over the biota, just like the human exotics have pretty much dis­placed the native pop­u­la­tions that were here before them. Those of us who aren’t Native Amer­i­cans are the human kudzus, the human tamarisks, the human tumbleweeds–opportunistic col­o­niz­ers of a benign new prospect. Some of these other gar­den plants could well go on to be the scourge of the con­ti­nent. But in the end the plants and the immi­grants all share the basic will to survive–survive first and ask moral ques­tions later if at all.

For­tu­nately, this aloes seems con­tent in its place as it gets big­ger, and big­ger, and big­ger, shad­ing its com­peti­tors and smoth­er­ing smaller plants around it.

Uh oh.

Sure is pretty though, eh?

January 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: aloes • drought-tolerant landscaping • immigration | 1 Comment »