Every visitor’s first drive up Pima Road produces the same sentence: “It’s all so brown.” Give it a week. The Sonoran is the lushest desert in North America, the only one on the continent with two rainy seasons — soft winter storms and the summer monsoon — and it grows more than it has any right to. Once you can name six plants, the brown turns into a neighborhood.
Here are the six, plus a few extras, and the one you should never touch.
Saguaro
The saguaro is the whole brand. It grows wild almost nowhere but the Sonoran Desert, and it grows slowly: a young saguaro can be only a few inches tall after its first decade, and the first arm usually doesn’t show up until the plant is well past half a century old. Big ones can stand forty feet and live for more than 150 years. The pleated skin expands like an accordion to store water after a storm.
Most saguaros start life in the shade of another plant — a “nurse tree,” usually a palo verde or an ironwood — and plenty of old saguaros are still standing in the tree that raised them.
The white blossom is Arizona’s state flower. It opens at night in late April and May, feeds bats, birds, and bees, and sets red fruit by early summer. Saguaros are protected under Arizona’s native plant law; moving one legally involves permits and tags, and taking one is a crime.
Palo verde
Arizona’s state tree, and the green one. “Palo verde” means green stick, and the bark really is green — it photosynthesizes, which lets the tree drop its tiny leaves in drought and keep working. In April the whole city goes yellow: blue palo verdes in the yards and medians first, foothill palo verdes on the hillsides a little later. If you own a pool under one, you’ll learn about it in April, too.
Ironwood
The quiet giant. Desert ironwood is a gray, wide-crowned tree that grows slowly, lives for centuries, and produces wood dense enough to sink in water. It’s a nurse plant to half the desert, and in May the ironwoods across the north end of town go lavender. If you inherit one in your yard, protect it like the heirloom it is.
Ocotillo
Not a cactus, and not dead, whatever it looks like. For most of the year an ocotillo is a fan of gray, thorny canes. Then it rains, and within days the canes are covered in small green leaves. When it dries out, the leaves drop. It can do this several times a year. In spring the tips flame red-orange, and the hummingbirds find them before you do. Old ranch properties used cut ocotillo canes as living fences, and some of them rooted and kept growing.
Creosote
The most common shrub in the desert and the one you’ve smelled without knowing it. Creosote bush has small, waxy, resinous leaves and yellow flowers, and after rain it gives off the smell that locals mean when they say the desert smells like rain. The monsoon field manual calls it the thing people who move away miss, and it’s true. Creosote can also clone itself into slow-spreading rings; some in the Mojave are estimated to be more than ten thousand years old.
Cholla, and the teddy bear rule
There are several kinds of cholla. The one that matters is the teddy bear cholla, a short, pale, fuzzy-looking cactus that glows gold when the sun is low. It is not fuzzy. That glow is a dense coat of barbed spines, and the segments break off at the slightest brush and ride away on your shin, your shoe, or your dog. Its cousin the jumping cholla does the same thing. Neither one jumps; it just feels that way.
The protocol:
- Don’t grab it. Your hand will become part of the problem.
- Use a comb. Slide a comb between the segment and your skin and flick it away. Locals carry one in the pack for exactly this.
- Pull what’s left with tweezers or pliers, one spine at a time.
- Watch the dog. Dogs find cholla the way toddlers find outlets.
There’s a reason Camelback’s other route is called the Cholla Trail. Stay in the middle of it.
The supporting cast
- Brittlebush: the silver-leaved mound that turns entire hillsides yellow in March.
- Prickly pear: flat pads, yellow spring flowers, and the magenta fruit that ends up in every local margarita.
- Barrel cactus: the fat one that leans south. The survival-water story is mostly a myth; the pulp is bitter and can make you sick.
- Mesquite: the shade tree of the washes, with the bean pods the Hohokam and their descendants ground into flour.
The bloom calendar
- February into March: wildflowers, if the winter was wet. Some years the hillsides are carpeted; some years there’s nothing. Rain in December and January decides it.
- March and April: brittlebush, ocotillo tips, and the penstemons. The Preserve is at its best.
- April: the palo verdes go gold, and the first saguaro blossoms open late in the month. The April page has the timing.
- May: saguaro blooms carry into the first half of the month, and the ironwoods go purple. See May.
- Monsoon: the ocotillos leaf out and the creosote does its trick.
Where to see them
- The Xeriscape Garden at Chaparral Park — about 200 species, all labeled, free. The best hour you’ll spend before planting anything in a yard, as our first-year notes insist.
- Brown’s Ranch — the densest saguaro forest in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, on flat trails. Our north Scottsdale hikes note has the routes.
- The Desert Botanical Garden in Papago Park, technically in Phoenix, is the region’s great living catalog of desert plants and well worth the drive.
The rules
Look, photograph, and leave it. Stay on the trail — the ground between trails is alive, and it takes decades to recover from a shortcut. Don’t pick flowers, don’t carve saguaros, and don’t touch anything fuzzy. The desert doesn’t need your help. It’s been doing fine without anyone for a very long time.