Today’s accompanying tune: “Daydreaming” by Rosa Pullman
Of the myriad of desert plants I have a love thing for, ocotillo are at the top of my list. For the unfamiliar, ocotillo are tall, spindly plants with massive spikes jutting out from their branches, all of which originate from a single point in the ground. They don’t have trunks, but they do have leaves and are deciduous plants, meaning their leaves grow yellow and fall off in winter. Each spring, they burst to life with vibrant red flowers at the tip of each branch, beckoning the best of the pollinators (namely, hummingbirds). They can grow to be up to 20 feet tall and 15 feet wide. Not too shabby, for a desert plant.
In the spring and summer, especially after a fresh rain storm, leaves appear on ocotillo branches, giving the formerly foreboding plant a cute, almost fuzzy-looking exterior. You would never know, underneath those leaves, are inch-long spikes protecting its core. Once they’ve bloomed, the leaves remain until they can’t any longer, either because of heat and drought or the cooling temperatures that signal winter’s imminent arrival. The blooms from the spring harden into new branches, soft, purplish bark replacing the vibrant petals. It grows slowly, as things often do in the desert, and consumes little water. Its low center of gravity keeps it in tact during wind storms — remember, it doesn’t have a central trunk — and each branch grows somewhat independently, similar to the function of an octopus’s arms. It is a strange and beautiful plant, perfectly fit for life in the desert.
“Is it dead?”
Most visitors have repeated his question, wondering why a bundle of sticks with sharp spikes is allowed to take up residence on our property. Wouldn’t it be easier to just get rid of it, replace it with something prettier? Why were we keeping an old, dead plant around?
It’s a refrain I hear a lot about all kinds of desert plants that value function over form. About the desert almonds and cats’ claw that, during most of the year, look more like tumbleweeds than living creatures. The showy plants are the ones you need to worry about, I respond, pointing to the invasive weeds and grasses tinting the hillside green while dusting everything in sight with the yellow dust of their pollen. They weren’t meant for this place, not meant to withstand the sun and heat and wind. They’ll dry up eventually, leaving a ready supply of kindling in their wake. Their death is welcomed, but hazardous. Meanwhile, the native plants are only just starting out, only just awakening their buds and shaking off the sleep of winter. They are hardy, evolved over millennia to thrive in environments that cause other species to shrivel and recede. In them, life continues as it has for as long as humanity can remember, and likely even longer than that.
But of all the plants that bear this connotation, I remain most taken with the ocotillo. They are often the first to bloom, and can bloom continuously through the summer in a heavy monsoon season. They are among the only deciduous plants native to the desert, and provide some of the best fall colors around. They are striking — visually, physically — when left bare, a reminder that survival here is not for the ill-prepared. When driving south through Joshua Tree National Park, you come upon a stand of ocotillo so thick that it resembles a forest. One minute you are watching the desert stretch on forever, and the next you are surrounded by towering, spiky plants. They offer modest shade and immodest beauty. And often, they are scraped to make way for new development along with cholla cactus and decades-old creosote bushes, allowing the weeds to lay claim to the bare ground newly exposed. Sickly ocotillo are sold at Home Depot and from plant dealers based in Arizona, where ocotillo are more plentiful, to hopeful homeowners looking to cultivate a piece of the desert that was removed for their arrival in the first place. Out with the old, in with the new.
If only those developers had seen the desert for what it was in the first place — a place full of unpretentious beauty. Far from a wasteland, it is teeming with life just under the surface, ready to spring into action once conditions are right. People, even, are rarely their best most vibrant selves one hundred per cent of the time. Why would we expect that from nature’s best and brightest? Signs of life are often more subtle than we can imagine — how the shade of bark changes as a tree loses its battle to beetles, the way an agave plant’s color shifts as it takes root and begins finding water. The big, showy signs of life are more like nature’s gift wrap — fun, sure, but not the real gift. They can be fleeting, as annual wildflower blooms always remind me. They can be enduring if the grand natural dice roll in just the right way. But they are there, always there, if you know where to look.
It’s not dead. It’s only starting to live.
Here’s to the weird, wonderful ocotillo.
- Megan