Plants of the Southwestern U.S. Gallery

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Click on the state you'd like to visit:

- Arizona

- Colorado

1. At Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. The park's namesake, also known as Stenocereus thurberi, grows in magnificent groupings on what is in fact one of America's most intricate and botanically rich landscapes. Anyone who thinks the deserts of the American Southwest are vast expanses of plantless rock and sand dunes needs to pay them a visit.

2. Also at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, east of Quitobaquito Springs. This low-growing shrub, growing literally a stone's throw from Mexico, is chuparosa -- Justicia californica. I took this picture in late February 1992; the plant was leafless but in full bloom with scarlet flowers.

3. This front yard in Scottsdale probably won't win any landscape-design awards, but it does have a California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) that retains a big petticoat of old, wilted leaves. See the plants of the same species shown in the Turkey section of my Plants of the Mediterranean Region Gallery.

4. It looks like a California fan palm, but actually it's Brahea armata. This handsome specimen shows one of its distinguishing traits: the leaves are glaucous -- a very pale blue. The species is native to Mexico's Baja California. The photo was taken in Scottsdale.

5. One of the most famous of all trees of the Old World tropics and subtropics -- Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm. This plant, on a Scottsdale side street, is setting fruit.

6. Looking like giant, mopheaded pipe cleaners, Mexican fan palms (Washingtonia robusta) are a favorite horticultural selection in the Phoenix metropolitan area. These Scottsdale trees far outstrip in height the other palms nearby.

7. Just down the road a bit from the previous shot. These Mexican fan palms, silhouetted against an office building, give a good sense of how tall they can grow despite their narrow trunks. The tallest two trees are approximately 60 feet high. One reason palms can achieve great stature is that their internal vascular system -- their water- and food- conducting tissues -- is arranged not in a central, bull's-eye pattern, but in array of separate columns running up and down the stem. It acts like a set of reinforcing bars used in modern building construction.

8. At Phoenix's Desert Botanical Garden. These are mature, flowering specimens of Echinocereus grusonii, the golden barrel cactus often grown indoors in colder climes by cactus fanciers.

9. The deserts of the world have produced a large assortment of odd plant forms, and one of the oddest is the boojum tree (Fouquieria columnaris) of Baja California. This plant and the one shown in the following photo are cultivated specimens grown in the Desert Botanical Garden.

10. A more profusely branched form. The term "boojum" was taken from Lewis Carroll's ready supply of fanciful names:

'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,

If your Snark be a Boojum! For then

You will softly and suddenly vanish away,

And never be met with again!'

11. Almost at the tree line, in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies. This is the uppermost section of the montane version of the taiga. Here conifers -- cone-bearing spruces and their relatives -- hold sway. Though outcom-peted by flowering plants in many other habitats, these relatively primitive trees are actually better adapted to harsh, cold environments. For the record, I did not drive that Bronco (or whatever it was) off the edge of the road. I hiked up here, and found the vehicle deserted by its unknown owner.

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