Colorful Wildflowers

Monkeyflower (Mimulus guttatus)

Seeing the colorful fireworks last night made me decide to have a colorful blog post today. The wildflowers are going crazy. The ones on the valley bottom are mostly shriveled up, but as we head up in elevation, it just gets better and better.

Palmer's penstemon (Penstemon palmeri) is a tall flower, approaching 3 feet, with clusters of vibrant pink blossoms at the top of each stem. It's found along roadsides from sagebrush-steppe to pinyon-juniper. It's sometimes called balloon flower.

Firecracker penstemon (Penstemon eatonii) are vibrant red and attention getting. I bought some seeds from a native seed nursery that I will plant this fall, and hopefully next summer I will be getting this color right in my own yard.

Thickleaf Penstemon (Penstemon pachphyllus) contrasts with the others due to its blue color. The penstemons have recently been reclassified from the Figwort (Scophulariaceae) family to the Plantain (Plantaginaceae) family. I'm wondering how they feel about that.

The Sunflower (Asteraceae) family has a huge number of flowers in it, many of them yellow. This one, Basin Butterweed (Senecio multilobatus), isn't too hard to distinguish with the many, small yellow ray flowers and the deeply divided leaves. 

Nodding Microseris (Microseris nutans) is widespread throughout the western U.S. It's less than a foot tall.

Northwestern paintbrush (Castilleja angustifolia) is found up to 10,000 feet, but is most common in the sage steppe. I bought some paintbrush seeds to plant this fall, but I've been warned that since this plant has a parasitic relationship with nearby plants, particularly sagebrush, it's unlikely that it will last beyond one year. Paintbrush is still in the figwort family. Are they lonely now that the penstemons moved out?

Celebrate Pollinator Week

Bee in tufted evening primrose (Oenothera caespitosa)

I recently learned from Bug Girl's Blog that the week of June 22-28 is Pollinator Week. Okay, so today is the last day of the week, but you weren't really planning on running out and celebrating it, were you?

Here are a few facts from www.pollinator.org that might make you decide to have a party after all. Pollinators are responsible for pollinating over 75 percent of flowering plants and 80 percent of the world's crops. They help produce $20 billion of crops each year, despite the fact that 3,000 acres of farmland are lost each day.

In honor of these awesome and often overlooked pollinators, I have some photos showing these pollinators in action. After taking a look here, go out and give the pollinators in your neighborhood a high-five. Well, you really shouldn't touch the wildlife, but give them a mental high-five. They'll appreciate it.

Small butterfly on unknown yellow flower

Swallowtail butterfly on Western columbine (Aquilegia formosa)

Small fly or bee in prickly pear cactus (Opuntia polyacantha) flower

And for those who think that there aren't many pollinators in the desert, in our valley alone we have over 200 species of bees, 150 species of butterflies and moths, 4 species of hummingbirds, and many species of bats, small mammals, beetles, ants, and wasps.

The Four North American Deserts

In an earlier post, I briefly mentioned the four North American deserts. Now I'll describe them in a bit more detail.

Sagebrush in the Great Basin Desert

Great Basin Desert

The Great Basin Desert is the biggest North American desert, covering most of the state of Nevada and extending into the states of Utah, Idaho, Oregon, and California. It is the only North American desert considered to be a cold desert, which is largely a function of its high elevation, with most basins above 4,000 feet in elevation, and mountaintops over 13,000 feet. Average annual precipitation is 6 to 12 inches. The term Great Basin originates from the fact that the water that falls in the Great Basin does not drain out to the ocean, but stays within the basin. It's really a bunch of basins separated by mountain ranges, but somehow trying to say that succinctly isn't easy.

The primary plant in the Great Basin Desert is sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), a fragrant green-gray shrub that grows up to several feet high. Several species of sagebrush grow in the desert. Other common plants are winterfat, greasewood, rabbitbrush, and saltbush. Salt Lake City, Utah and Reno, Nevada are in the Great Basin Desert.

Lechuguilla in the Chihuahuan Desert

Chihuahuan Desert

The Chihuahuan Desert is the spiny desert, with lots of sharp plants. It is found primarily in Mexico, but a small portion creeps across the border and into New Mexico and Texas. It's the coolest of the hot deserts, with elevations ranging from 1,200 to 6,000 feet, and it receives up to 10 inches of precipitation annually.

While creosote bush and ocotillo are common, the distinctive plant in this desert is the lechuguilla (Agave lechuguilla). It's a member of the Agave family and has razor sharp spines. Other spiky plants are other agaves, yuccas, sotols, thorny mesquites, and a variety of cacti. El Paso, Texas and Carlsbad and Roswell, New Mexico are within the Chihuahuan Desert.

Saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert

Sonoran Desert

The Sonoran Desert is the neat cactus desert, with the characteristic saguaro cactus (Carnegiea gigantea) holding up its arms. In addition to this charismatic character, the Sonoran desert has the greatest species diversity of all North American deserts, despite being the hottest of the four deserts. 

Precipitation ranges from less than 2 inches to more than 12 inches. The desert creeps into southern Arizona and California, but the majority of it is found in Mexico. Phoenix and Tuscon, Arizona are part of the Sonoran Desert.

Joshua tree in the Mojave Desert

Mojave Desert

The Mojave is the smallest of the four North American deserts, but what it lacks in size it makes up in character. This is the desert with the Dr. Seuss-like Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia).

The Mojave Desert is found between the Sonoran and Great Basin deserts in California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. It is a transition area between the two deserts, ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 4,000 feet on average, although it also includes Death Valley which descends below sea level and Mt. Charleston at over 11,000 feet. This is the driest of the four deserts, with 2 to 5 inches of annual precipitation. Las Vegas, Nevada and Palmdale, California, St. George, Utah, and Lake Havasu City, Arizona are in the Mojave Desert.

So in summary:

Largest Desert: Great Basin (or Chihuhuan based on some maps)

Smallest Desert: Mojave

Hottest Desert: Sonoran

Driest Desert: Mojave

Best Desert: You decide

A great resource for learning more about these deserts and the plants that live in them is Ronald J. Taylor's Desert Wildflowers of North America. And now Desert Boy, Henry, and I are going to head outside to go enjoy another desert adventure.

Xeriscaping with Native Plants

Don't you just love the word xeriscape? I mean, how cool is it to use a word that begins with the letter x. The meaning of the word is neat, too. It's landscaping without the use of supplemental water, and the word was invented by combining xeros, Greek for dry, with landscape.

This last year my husband and I have been trying to come up with ways to make our house and yard more sustainable. We live in a one hundred year-old house that has a rock foundation, and in the winter we didn't like all that cold air seeping under the house. So he put a planter around it and filled it with dirt as an insulator. Our heating costs went down, and the planter has the added benefit that I have a convenient place to plant. The water that falls on the roof of the house drips right into the planter, so I have a built in watering system.

This spring I did some research on the internet and found a native plant nursery a couple hours from our house (everything seems to be a couple hours away, if not more). We went over and I had a wonderful time picking out some native plants. One of the best things about the native plants is that they've evolved with the desert conditions, so they don't need as much water as most of the other plants available in nurseries.

We only get about six inches of precipitation a year where we live, compared to 35 inches a year in Chicago and 42 inches a year in New York. So most plants that grow in the East or Midwest don't do so well in the dry Southwest unless they get a lot of extra help. That extra help means watering, which as you can see by the precipitation amounts, is a scarce resource. 

Desert plants aren't necessarily drab, as you can see in the photo above. This beautiful flower is desert globemallow (Sphaeralcea grossularifolia), a common flower that decorates the desert valleys and benches beginning in May and lasting through a good part of the summer. It grows well, so is often used in reseeding mixes after wildfires. 
This little fern bush (Chamaebatiaria millefolium) will grow into a five foot tall bush with beautiful yellow blossoms. I love it because it's leaves look like ferns, which are so incongruous in the desert. Yet it is a native plant.

Great Basin wildrye (Leymus cinereus) is a native grass that can grow up to a horse's belly. It's not nearly so large in our yard, probably because the deer like to come through and munch on it!

When we planted this squawbush (Rhus trilobata), it looked like a stick in the ground. Fortunately a couple weeks later it started leafing out. In the fall the leaves should turn a beautiful red. Another common name is skunkbush, apparently because the leaves stink. I will have to go take a sniff soon.
We have several kinds of currants that are native here, including the wax currant (Ribes cereum). I think that's the one this is, but I'm not entirely sure. In the late summer they produce tangy berries. 
Cliff rose (Cowania stanburiana) is a shrub that has small white flowers. So far ours hasn't produced any flowers, but hopefully it will next year. It will grow to be a couple feet high. Deer also love to browse this plant, so we will need to train our puppy Henry to keep them away. So far Henry hasn't been good at keeping anything away, including the skunks.
Penstemon (Penstemon sp.) lend a lot of color to the planter. I really should have written down which kind this is (or take the time to key it out), but for the moment I will just say that it's a beautiful penstemon. We don't always have to know the name to appreciate the beauty, right?
And finally, this little cactus (maybe Simpson's Hedgehog Cactus (Pediocactus simpsonii)) surprised me by producing a flower bud. I can't wait to see it open. 

So what native plants do you have or would like to get for your yard?

Delicate Beauty among the Spines

When I think of the word desert, one of the first images that comes to mind is cactus. But of the four deserts found in North America, only one, the Sonoran Desert  in southern Arizona, southern California and northwestern Mexico is famous for its cacti. The mighty Saguaro live there, with its arms reaching up towards the sky. The Mojave Desert in southern Nevada and California is known more for its Joshua trees, although it has quite a few cholla, spiky two-foot tall branching cacti. The Chihuahuan Desert is primarily in Mexico but stretches northward into southern Texas and New Mexico and has numerous agaves, including the neat Century Plant. And finally there's the Great Basin Desert, centered over Nevada and poking into Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and California. It's considered to be a cold desert and contains oceans of sagebrush separated by pinyon and juniper covered mountain islands. It doesn't have many cacti, but still the careful observer can find some. And during the late spring and early summer, colorful flowers help show off these prickly inhabitants.
The stunning color of this red flower caught my eye one day when we were sightseeing in some nearby hills. We call them hills out here, even though they rise over 2,000 feet above the valley floor. That's still chunk change compared to the mountains, which tower up to 8,000 feet over the valley floor. But I digress. Back to the flowers. It had rained recently, and the petals had captured the drops of precious water.
More common are pink flowers. I found this one yesterday. Cactus flowers always amaze me with how delicate they look, especially with the stark contrast of the prickly spines so close to them.
This flower looked even more delicate, rising up off a narrow cactus pedestal.
Looking down into the flower, I could see how complex it was. And a sister flower was next to it, waiting for the right moment to show its beauty.
This bloom caught my eye. It is the ultimate image of spring in the desert. A beautiful sight that's able to survive the harsh desert conditions.