Big-rooted Spring Beauty

I roamed from the Phoenix suburbs to the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains this summer, where one of my favorite plants thrives. Succulent. Delicate. Long-lived. Claytonia megarhiza is a common alpine plant growing on talus and scree in North American mountain ranges, forming perfect rosettes of leathery leaves surrounded by porcelain white flowers. The magnificent roots can grow to six feet long and up to three inches in diameter! Eighteenth century Virginia botanist John Clayton should be proud to have such a fine species named after him!

So Tall Sotol

The desert is lusty with heat and flowers. After a couple months of daily measurable growth, the sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) in our neighbor's yard is finally blooming. The fifteen foot tall stalk rises from a rosette of sawtooth edged leaves, luring swarms of honeybees (Apis mellifera) and tiny colletid bees (Hylaeus spp.) that come to gather pollen. I've watched the astonishing growth of sotol stalks for nearly a decade, but did not realize until recently that they are dioecious, meaning that there are botanical equivalents of male and female plants.

Male plants bear only pollen-producing flowers. The sheer magnitude of the stalk and all of that pollen production makes me blush. We spent an hour filming and recording audio of this event the other morning, while watching with rapt attention through binoculars. The best entertainment is often just out our front door!

Females bear thousands of seed-producing flowers (below). Although the bees harvest prodigious amounts of pollen, they do nothing for fertilizing the female flowers because there is no nectar to attract them. The females depend on wind to deliver pollen for fertilization.


The seed and pollen producing catkins look very different side by side. From a distance, you can tell the two types of stalks from one another simply by noticing the presence or absence of insect activity.

Prior to blooming, the catkins emerge from the protective covering of a sheath, waiting for the proper environmental signals, probably a certain minimum temperature, before bursting forth in an orgiastic frenzy.

Meanwhile, in our backyard, a 20 foot tall yucca stalk flowers by the light of a full moon.

What's a woman to do?!?

Breaking the Silence

It's been awhile since I've written here. My last post was conceived a few months ago in the natural quiet beneath a palo verde tree. Since then, being outside in the brilliant Sonoran spring has taken priority to sitting down to write in this forum. But now it is hot again, so there is less incentive for me to hike, and perhaps more time to write. Summer in Phoenix is the equivalent to bitter winter in northern climates, where people hunker indoors to protect themselves from harsh weather.

Quiet is still on my mind. I just returned from a writing workshop in Santa Fe, where the photo above was taken. Silouhettes cast on canvas walls of a warehouse in the plaza caught my attention, an unplanned work of art among a feast of galleries. There was no author that I know of but Nature. Here, Nature includes a human element, whomever formed the wrought iron fence and hung the canvas. There is no price tag for this work (although I'm willing to sell the photo, of course!).

Breaking the silence comes on the heals too, of conversation with my friend Claudette, who had recently returned from a six day silent meditation retreat in northern New Mexico. Less than 24 hours after she came home, we visited in her kitchen in Santa Fe. She, her husband Charles and I chattered for four hours; we had a lot of catching up to do after over a year apart. Words flowed along with laughter as we shared soup and bread.

Two days later, when I had a few hours to myself, I found myself yearning for more silence. The week had been filled with words: reading, writing, talking, listening to lectures. In the hills above Santa Fe, I sat by a creek and let all those words go. Just bird song and running water and wind in the pines. Natural quiet.

That is when I composed an essay, not the one above, but this one below: a 200 word message of silence:

May Peace be with you.

The Listening Game

Today we played the Listening Game while hanging out in the desert under a palo verde tree. Here are the sounds we heard:

1. Gambel's quail call

2. Verdin call

3. airplanes

4. car traffic

5. breathing

6. Cactus wren call

7. Farting

8. insects buzzing

9. Curve-billed thrasher call

10. people talking on the trail

In between all of that was quiet. Pure quiet.

Green Time

Whenever we can, my son and I go out into the desert and rest inside the canopy of a palo verde tree where we can breathe air freshly made from its green bark and peer out through branches to the cactus and blue sky. This is our "green time," an anecdote to "screen time," which seems to keep us in its glowing grip too many hours of each day. In this shelter I teach my son the fine art of hanging out, listening for birds and lizards, watching the sky change colors, and smelling the dry earth and creosote. He always wants to bring along a book to read, which I generally encourage at home, but here, I want him to put it away and just be in the desert. It startles me that this is so hard for him. Screen time has taught him to need constant noise and action. The natural quiet and stillness bores and somewhat disturbs him. This fact disturbs me even more.

I'm going up into the desert to sit under a palo verde tree and think about this.

Inside Outside

Our New Years Day was highlighted by a visit to Taliesin West, home of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, where we spent two hours touring student designed housing on the founder's spacious estate. A great deal of Wright's legacy is the idea of integrating architecture with the natural outdoor landscape and vice versa. To help young architects develop some personal experience with the unique Sonoran desert environment, they are housed in "shelters" that have been designed and built by former students.

Each structure had its own artistic signature, underscored by airy theoretical concepts of contemporary architecture being taught at the school. One integrated a reflection pool. Another simulated a ship. Several used shade cloth stretched in abstract ways. Many had fire pits or fireplaces to add a little warmth on chilly winter nights. A patch of artificial lawn was part of the patio in one student's cynical commentary on landscaping choices of the "commoners" in the somewhat architecturally parched residential areas around Phoenix. All of them demonstrated heroic efforts to transcend the standard box and peak roof forms of American architecture in general or humdrum stucco and tile of southwest architecture in particular.

But what struck me most was the quixotic inattention to basic elements of the environment that ended up making many of the structures unlivable. Like wind. Or rain. And sun. Our guides let us in on which structures were avoided because of winds that howled through the bed chamber every night, needed a tarp to shield from the rain, became too blazing hot on a sunny day, or happened to be built in the favorite pathway of resident wildlife. Only a few met the criteria of being reliable shelter from the weather. I'm no architect, but I guess I thought that if I were being trained to be one who is especially sensitive to the environment that I build in, these would be some of my primary concerns as a designer. Call me practical.

However, they were all very cool spaces, in the stylistic sense, to hang out in. Some of the features I liked the best were the spiral arrangement of stones for a fire circle; a window that featured an especially handsome saguaro for a view; a dash of the Great Master himself represented by a hanging screen designed by Wright; and that lawn with its symbolic watering can. But next time I want to spend the night in the desert, I'll happily rely on my sturdy dome-shaped tent to help keep me warm, dry and protected from the wind.

For more information on Taliesin West and tours they offer there, you can find everything you need on their website: www.franklloydwright.org

All of the photos in this entry were taken by my daughter Brooke Warren, who has her own fun blog at:

brooklynwarren.blogspot.com

Desert Snow

Hot and dry versus cold and wet. The two came together yesterday in the hills up by Cave Creek where I ventured to help out with one of the annual Audubon Christmas bird counts. What few birds we saw were hunkered down in the scrub with feathers fully fluffed to insulate them from the blustery weather. I too had my down coat on! Here is my birding partner, Paul, braving the winter storm, and a small pile of snow-(graupel actually)-caught in the club moss.



There is also a wildflower called desert snow, a phlox aka Linanthus demissus, which will bloom in the spring if all this moisture is enough to keep it going past germination this spring! Here are some that I found in Deem Hills in March of 2008. Looks a lot like the real thing, but smells sweeter!