I grew this fiercely thorny rose, Rosa minutifolia, for over a decade. With wild-rose-pink flowers barely two inches across, its petals were crinkled and delicate, but the blooms were never particularly stunning when compared to the buxom, botoxed blooms of typical garden roses. The leaves were tiny to the point of almost being non-existent, and I’ve already mentioned the incredible number of thorns that made this just about the prickliest thing I’ve ever dealt with. (The only similarly thorny roses I can think of are a few heirloom moss roses like Alfred de Dalmas that I grew in my early teen rose-growing years.) So spiny is it that one of its early collectors proposed an alternate name for it: Rosa horrida. (Check out the fascinating tale of its discovery by Barbara Ertter here.)
In the end, I think I grew it partly because of its weirdly cool thorniness and its interesting story, but also because of its artificial, political rarity. In the United States, this rose is found only as a small island population along the Mexican border on Otay Mesa, here in San Diego County. This extreme rarity has placed it on California’s endangered species list. Skip south into Mexico a few dozen miles, however, and the plant begins to become a fairly common member of the chaparral plant community, forming great mounded thickets three to four feet high and many feet across. The notion that the plant is particularly rare is an artifact of national boundaries. Erase the US-Mexico border, and Rosa minutifolia becomes a mainstay of part of the pan-Californian ecosystem.
I find that to be a weird little mental game: Is the plant rare or not? What odd things do political boundaries do to how we understand the natural world that those boundaries are drawn over? Does that mean that it’s crazy to call this an endangered plant?
To that last question, I’ll answer that we really should consider it a plant to protect. We need to preserve what’s left of the diversity that remains in the world. If the plant goes extinct in California, it’s gone from California. Never mind that it has cousins south of the border.
And these days the purely conceptual notion of a national border is turning into a physical reality, as the ginormous border fence project turns the United States into a freakish zoo exhibit behind bars as this video produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows. (I also did a brief post related to all this recently, on the destruction of Smuggler’s Gulch.) When the only know U.S. population of this plant is further isolated from its southern kin, it becomes all the more desperate to preserve what little we have left.
When we were preparing the back yard for a small room addition we needed to move a few plants out of the way. My Rosa minutifolia was one of them. Used to near-desert conditions, the plant shoots down roots far into the ground, maybe even 20 feet deep. I guess I didn’t get enough of the roots, not to mention the fact that the transplant took place in the high heat of summer. The plant declined and then died over the course of a couple months.
I see the plant here and there. A native plant sale might have a few plants. The Tree of Life Nursery stocks it. Botanical gardens sometimes have a little thicket of it (or a massive thicket of it as is the case at Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden where “five rooted cuttings planted…in 1954 had become ‘one large tangled mass’ nearly 30 feet across by 1982″ [ source ]). All these photos are from the Huntington’s Desert Garden, where the rose grows alongside cactus and other things that make its spininess look right at home.
I get nostalgic whenever I see it. My little plant, which was set in awful, dense, dry soil in a much too shady spot, never grew or flowered much. Nipping at the dead branches kept it from forming a Rosa horrida thicket. But I continued to coddle it for whatever reasons any of us coddle interesting, under-performing plants. And one of these days I wouldn’t be surprised if I plant another little thicket of it.
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.
