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Desert Blooming Days
"I am pining for my old desert homestead,
Where the moon and the starts shine so bright;
To again smell the sage and the greasewood,
While the coyotes howl through the night.
When the flowers of the desert are blooming,
And the swallow is building its nest
Where the high guardian peaks are a-looming
O'er my old desert home in the west."
~ When Desert Flowers Bloom, Curley Fletcher (1892-1954)
Even a desert can burst into bloom in the spring, inspiring this beautiful tartan designed in 1972 for Aljean of Canada, capturing the explosion of color over the subdued greens of an arid landscape.
Deserts are found on every continent—from the polar deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic to the sweeping sands of Sahara Desert and the drylands of the Middle East. In North America, the Chihuahuan Desert, Sonoran Desert, and Mojave Desert stretch across the Southwest, while even small outliers like the Carcross Desert in Canada remind us that deserts come in all scales. Despite their reputation for barrenness, deserts are finely tuned ecosystems, where plants and animals are adapted to survive long stretches of drought—waiting, sometimes for years, for just the right conditions.
Within the Mojave lies Death Valley National Park, straddling California and Nevada—a landscape of salt flats, dunes, and mountains that includes Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. It is also a place of remarkable extremes, holding the record for the highest reliably recorded air temperature on Earth: 134°F (56.7°C), measured at Furnace Creek in 1913. Summer heat regularly climbs well above 120°F, reinforcing its reputation as one of the hottest places on the planet!
Thanks to well-timed winter rains, large patches of wildflowers have spread across parts of the valley—a superbloom, especially along lower elevations and alluvial fans—bringing bursts of desert gold, purple phacelia, and delicate pink blooms into the stark landscape. While this year’s display may be more localized than the rare, valley-wide explosions of color seen in exceptional years, it still offers a vivid reminder that even in one of the hottest, driest places on Earth, life is poised to respond beautifully the moment conditions allow. 🧡 💛 💚 🤍 🌵 🏵️ 🏵️ 🏵️ 🐝
Desert plants grow in one of the harshest environments on Earth, and have special adaptations that help them to survive.
Some plants avoid dry conditions by completing their life cycle before desert conditions intensify. These plants usually mature in a single season and then die, but produce seeds that later blossom into new plants.
In the Sonoran Desert of North America, 90% of plant species are annuals, and many germinate during the short fall season, when a small amount of rainfall is required for germination. In some cases, not all seeds germinate at the same time, but remain dormant and germinate the following year or even years later. Plants that germinate in the fall grow slowly through the winter and flower in the spring, after which they die before the summer heat begins.
The saguaro(Carnegiea gigantea) is a tree-like cactus species native to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, the Mexican state of Sonora, and the Whipple Mountains and Imperial County areas of California. The saguaro blossom is the state wildflower of Arizona. Its scientific name is given in honor of Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose Carnegie Institution established the Desert Botanical Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, in 1903.
Many desert plants have spines and thorns to discourage predation by animals. Others camouflage such as the Arizona night-blooming cereus.
Desert plants have smaller leaves, seasonal leaves or no leaves at all. Species with small leaves, such as the little leaf palo verde tree or Parkinsonia microphylla, have less surface area on leaves and therefore lose less water through evapotranspiration.
Plants like acacia and ocotillo, which are summer deciduous, drop their leaves during the hot season.
Additionally, plants such as cacti have spines or thorns instead of leaves, and photosynthesis occurs in stems or bark.
And because dark colors absorb more heat, some plants have light-colored leaves to reflect light and therefore lose less water from transpiration as in the light dusty green of the sagebrusth (Artemisia tridentata) and in the group of plants colloquially known as "tumbleweeds" which when mature and dry, detach from its root or stem and rolls due to the force of the wind.
For this year's blooming spring in Death Valley, California, click the photograph.