This isn’t one of my photos. It’s a lovely Creative Commons photo by Dennis Behm. There won’t be many more of mine until I can afford to replace the Canon’s dying battery, which may be some time. Thank you, o stalwart battery. Your lithium ions served me well.
Moving to an entirely new biome brings with it unexpected treats. I’ve enjoyed getting to know a few new wildflowers — though not so many in the past weeks, as financial and health issues have gotten in the way of my spending a lot of time hiking. Not long ago I learned that the most common lizards around here have three male… well, genders, for lack of a more precise term. Or castes. Or guilds. You got your blue-throated side-blotched lizards, and your orange- and yellow-throated side-blotcheds as well, and each color has a different mating strategy. The blue-throats are steadfast, if I may anthropomorphize just a tad, and they stand guard over their mates’ territories. The bigger orange-throats can chase the blue-throats off. The yellow-throats are smaller than the blues, so they can’t usurp the blue’s mates, but they can sneak in and cuckold the orange-throats, which apparently have trouble distinguishing the little yellow-throats from female side-blotched lizards. Thus orange outcompetes blue, which outcompetes yellow, which outcompetes orange: a rock-paper-scissors-style circular hierarchy. Now when I see the side-blotched lizards on the trail I always try to look under their chins, which is difficult from my usual respectful distance.
And as I said, not so much of that lately. Instead, I’ve started running at night again, when I have the reserves and it’s down below 99 degrees. About three weeks ago the neighborhood handed me another little treat I wasn’t expecting: all the Dasylirion of a certain age started blooming.
It’s a common landscaping plant around here. It’s not native to the Salton Sink: it comes from the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts in Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua. But it’s pretty ubiquitous in the neighborhood: it does great in the summer heat around here with just a little water. It’s a rosette succulent in the agave family, though the leaves don’t call to mind “succulence” so much as they do “chainsaw.” The species has some wicked teeth. I omitted it from my old garden up north — though I had its sibling D. quadrangulatum, and many of its pokey and even serratedly spiny cousins in the genera Nolina, Yucca and Agave, because this Dasylirion was just too damned unfriendly, and I didn’t really want to deal with lacerated dog every week or so. Or lacerated me, for that matter.
But I’ve always appreciated the plant, and it’s been nice to get used to having a lot of them around as boring commercial landscape fodder, which in these parts includes a few species I’m still not used to in that context. There’s a cheap motel around the corner, for instance, that’s got a huge saguaro in its front parking lot. It’s blooming right now. I’m not quite ready to be nonchalant about a Motel 6 parking lot saguaro in bloom. There are tons of Hesperaloe all up and down the divided highway medians, wrongly labeled as “aloe relatives” in the gardens at the Living Desert — it’s actually about a hair away from being a yucca. We’ve had palo verde blooming in the vacant lots with happy hour going on next door. It’s all a bit disconcerting, like when I went to Honolulu and saw a sad, broken, neglected street tree that turned out to be a plumeria.
I should have expected it all by now. When I first moved to California from back east in 1982, there were certain plants that I knew well as perpetually ailing houseplants: consumptive little spider plants, jade trees coughing Camille-like and always on the verge of expiring just before spring, and then I started working in gardens in Oakland and casually ripping up what would have been six hundred bucks worth of Buffalo houseplants that had gone a little too feral in someone’s backyard, or cutting back a meter of growth off the jade tree because it was blocking the client’s driveway. Moving to Los Angeles was a bit like that as well. In Berkeley, my crazy gardening housemate Marcia was unduly proud of her Chorisia, which was at least fifteen feet tall and three inches across at breast height, bedecked with killer thorns. IN Los Angeles they were the size of telephone poles. Like I said, I should be used to this kind of thing.
Still, it caught me by surprise in May when just about every single Dasylirion of a certain size started putting out a flower stalk a couple inches thick, each stalk growing a good few inches a day. Within a couple weeks most of them were 8-12 feet tall, and they started unfoldling their flowers. The hummingbirds have been very busy.
I’ve been missing having a garden, a feeling that wasn’t particularly assuaged by visiting the Living Desert’s nursery. Annette and I walked in and I saw the plant stock, the thistle tube sock feeders covered in finches, and my heart opened up a little and then I remembered why I didn’t let it do that these days. Also, I suddenly really missed Ron’s company, not that I don’t anyway.) I didn’t tend well to the last garden I had in the last year I had it, nor to much else, and I suppose it’s been good to have that responsibility lifted from me for a bit. But there’s something missing from me without a patch of earth to tend. Even the rock-hard, ivy-infested square of builder’s clay I called a front yard in Oakland when we first had Zeke grounded me, gave me someplace to sink roots. I realized yet again this last week that I’ll likely never have a “rest of my life” garden. I seem to be yanking myself up by the roots too often for that. And yet without a garden it’s harder for me to feel connected to a place. I got around it in Nipton, where it felt like the entire Mojave was my garden: I would go to Wee Thump or the Preserve and feel utterly connected, if utterly desolate. But who knows how I would have felt if I had been there longer than a year?
In any event, the coordinated sotol blooms are a good palliative, something to notice and know that not everyone does notice and thus a way to feel slightly more connected than I might otherwise. Darwin said “a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.” Turns out that holds true of people staying at home as well.
1 comment on "Dasylirion wheeleri"
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