It's moments before sunrise in the Anza Barego Desert.
In this predawn interlude between darkness and light, there's nothing quite like being
here in the midst of all these wildflowers.
The new day will be the first day of our journey through the wild gardens.
Hello, and welcome to the Wild Gardens.
I'm your host, Martin Hale.
What is a wild garden?
Well, a wild garden is a garden that's wild.
In other words, wildflowers.
We're going to visit the wild gardens of California, starting in the Anza Barego Desert.
This isn't a scientific expedition, but rather a journey to the gardens themselves to see
the intrinsic beauty of the wildflowers and the places they grow.
Are you ready?
Me, too.
Oh, by the way, the desert sometimes comes under a magical spell.
When this is transformed into this, a spell lasts only a short time.
A desert blue is a breathtaking sight.
It doesn't happen every year.
Conditions have to be just right.
It's about rainfall, climate.
It's about geology, elevations, the lay of the land.
It's about the combination of conditions that allow these living things to exist here.
California is one of the world's premier wild gardens.
We know that for every four flowering plants in the United States, one is found in California.
It's one in four, 25%.
This is one of the world's botanical hotspots.
If you've ever traveled around California, it's easy to see why.
It starts with size.
The land is diverse, amazingly diverse, and a good part of that is due to size.
First place is 770 miles long, and an average of about 200 miles wide.
Why?
You've got this here in Nevada mountain range with a 14,491-foot peak.
And not so far away, 282-feet below sea level in Death Valley National Park.
Major mountain ranges in the east.
Coastal mountains in the west.
Beautiful valleys.
Hundreds of miles of coastal habitat.
Rivers, lakes, and back to where we are now, the great deserts of the southeast.
For the wild gardens to appear here in the desert, you've got to have rain.
In the California deserts, the rain comes in the winter and spring, and if we're lucky,
a little in the fall.
The Anza Barrego Desert is located about 140 miles southeast of Los Angeles and just west
of the Salton Sea.
This is prime western Sonoran desert country.
Let's see what we've got today.
We'll start by taking a look at those flowers we were in just before sunrise.
The soil here is sandy.
It's like a gigantic wash.
During the rains, water comes out of the canyon from the north end, and everything gets a
good soaking.
This is heaven to plants that like loose sandy soil.
Conditions are ripe for any number of species.
The first thing you'll notice are all those purple flowers.
They're called sand verbena.
These good looking plants form large masses if they get enough rain.
They have a very pleasant fragrance and really dress up a desert scene with their vivid color.
Now when we were looking at the masses of sand verbena, you probably saw some white patches.
Many of those are dune evening primrose.
They are an impressive large by desert standards flower.
The petals can be up to a half inch long.
They love the sandy soil and can form masses just like the sand verbena.
It's funny, I've noticed that in some years they outnumber the sand verbena, in others
like this year, not.
The Coyote Canyon region offers lots of opportunities for wildflower hunting.
In addition to the alluvial floor, you've got walls of jumbled rock and almost invisible
little side canyons and tributaries.
There are good places everywhere for finding wildflowers.
Let's climb up some of those jumbled rocks and see what we can find.
Now here is a flower worth the effort.
This beauty is called desert or rock hibiscus.
This is a two to two and a half inch flower.
In the western Sonoran desert, they're usually white.
Further east, they're more pink in color.
They are a gorgeous flower, and at least in my experience, not that common.
The shrub is two to three feet tall.
There's a certain magic in finding a big beautiful flower like this in the desert.
This plant is a member of the Malo family.
The nearby is a desert tobacco plant.
Native Americans and the early Spanish settlers smoked this plant.
It's hard for me to imagine smoking the leaves of this plant.
Like the hibiscus, it can reach three feet in height, which this one certainly is.
It has these interesting looking white flowers and is actually a member of the nightshade
family.
A little further on is a side canyon.
Let's go in and see what denizens of the wild garden will find.
The first thing we see is this rattlesnake weed.
These are tiny flowers, tinier than you think.
You see the white petals with a little black part connected to the center?
Well, the black part is a gland, and the seeming white petal is actually an extension of that
gland.
The flower itself is the tiny pink center.
Look at them, compared to a penny.
These flowers are a perfect example of the size of many desert species.
The lesson here is always take a magnifying glass when you go looking at flowers in the
desert.
Whole timers used to call desert wildflowers belly flowers.
First is because you had to get on your belly to see them.
One of my favorite desert wildflowers is the broad leafed gillia.
Like the hibiscus, I don't seem to find many of these.
The leaf almost looks like a holly.
With the small pink flowers, it makes an interesting contrast.
I've noticed that for all their good looks, they have a bad smell.
Right across the trail, in bloom is a nice beaver tail cactus.
The beautiful pink flower opens up to four or five inches, making it one of the largest
of desert wildflowers.
As we look at it, it brings to mind one of many survival techniques employed by desert
plants.
Stims succulents, like this beaver tail cactus, store water in their fleshy pads.
They open their pores at night to admit carbon dioxide.
During the day, they close their pores, do their photosynthesis, and preserve the water
inside the pad.
There's a lot more for us to see back in the main canyon.
In those masses of San Verbena and Dunne evening primrose are some other interesting fellows
that live in this community.
There's a beautiful example of a plant called Laxflower.
The name stems from the fact that the petals been back, I suppose.
This one's had a good watering.
It's very large.
More desert survival techniques can be seen with Laxflower.
Ice is first.
When there's good rain, these plants get big.
When there's less, they remain small and stunted.
Notice the fine hairs on the leaves and stems.
These help dissipate heat and keep the plant cool.
The light silvery green color on the leaves and stems reflect sunlight, also cooling it
down.
An impressive flower in the Anza Barrego desert is the desert or aho lily.
It gives us insight into yet another example of survival in the desert.
This plant is called a bulb perennial.
There's an enlarged bulb storing food and water deep underground.
It will only grow above the surface if it gets a good deep soaking in the winter.
The aho part of the name comes from Spanish for garlic.
Native Americans ate the bulbs and so did the early Spanish settlers.
You know, no one has ever successfully cultivated an aho lily.
Another local inhabitant is the spectacle pod.
You can see the round flat pod structures resembling a spectacle case.
This is a big, beautiful specimen.
It got lots of rain.
I've never found a spectacle pod plant anywhere but here in Coyote Canyon.
I know they grow all over the Sonoran Desert, but I've only found them here.
I can almost measure the amount of rainfall here by the size of the spectacle pod plants.
Well, talk about survival strategy.
This strange looking fellow has it down.
It's called desert broom rape.
It's a parasite.
It attaches itself to the root system of a host, like a creosote bush.
The host does all the work and our friend here is totally dependent on it for survival.
It does produce a good-looking flower and is, in its own strange way, an interesting-looking
thing.
One of the most common annuals in the western Sonoran or Colorado desert is the desert pincushion.
From a distance, it looks like a little white ball on a skinny stem, but like most of the
other desert flowers, up close makes all the difference.
It really is kind of a stealth flower in that it hides its beauty in its small size and
great numbers.
It's a cluster of well-defined, delicate groups of petals.
It does look like a pincushion.
A common but attractive plant here in the desert is the brown-eyed evening primrose.
You know, I've found these in all kinds of desert settings.
It doesn't matter, I always stop to admire them whenever I come across them.
The delicate white petals with a maroon center and the long yellow stamens and pestle make
this flower a delight.
Not far away, we find this yellow petal variant.
I really don't know which one I like better.
How about you?
They're both beautiful flowers, but the yellow one doesn't seem to be as common as the white
one.
Now here is a master of covering the desert floor.
It's called desert sunflower or desert gold.
By itself, it's a very pretty member of the sunflower family.
This one truly is a case of, when you get the rain, you get the flowers.
They will cover the ground with the right provocation from the weather.
They can be found in many of the western deserts under 3,000 feet of elevation.
What makes this Coyote Canyon area so good for wildflower hunting is the diversity of
the place itself.
Surface water is found here.
Now, that's a rarity.
The gigantic sandy floor, one of the largest washes I've seen in any desert, is another
attraction.
The rocky sides and varieties of soils and elevations also make good, wildflower habitat.
It's no wonder it's one of the most visited places in the Anza Barrego Desert.
At 50 or 60, scenic minute south of Coyote Canyon is another interesting wildflower area
with a glimpse of the distant past.
Behind me is the beginning of mountain palm springs.
This truly is a glimpse into the distant past.
These palms are the last survivors of a wetter age.
Palm gros like this are scattered all over the Barrego Desert.
They once surrounded a great inland sea.
These palms are the only palms that are native to California.
They're called California fan palms.
You can find them around seeps or springs, places where even if the water is underground,
it's still there most of the time.
It's soothing to stand alone in one of the groves and listen to the sound of a quail calling
in the distance as the fronds rustle overhead.
It's the deep cuts here between the rock berms where we'll get some good, wildflower viewing.
This is what we're looking at, coarse sand with compacted sandy soil between the larger
rocks.
This is perfect habitat for any number of species.
Now here is a beautiful flower.
Look at this thing.
It's called desert chicory, they're common throughout the desert.
If you examine them closely, you can see a delicate beauty few desert flowers can rival.
They exude a milky sap if you break a stem.
Up close, like this, I call them angel's wings.
They are so exquisite.
Now you've got to have a rainy year to get these yellow twinning snapdragons.
On top of that, they like to hide themselves inside the shrubs they attach themselves to.
I don't find these very often, but they're a good looking flower and look every bit of
a snap dragon.
I guess their scarcity makes them even more attractive to me.
We'll end our visit to Mountain Palm Springs with two showstoppers.
The first is this bigelose or yellow throat monkey flower.
This is a great flower to find in the desert.
I love to watch people who are seeing them for the first time.
It's hard for them to believe that anything like this is growing out here.
Finding beautiful flowers in the desert is like finding horns on a fish's head.
It just seems so unlikely.
The bigelow monkey flower is another example of a plant that grows larger with more water.
Our final flower is a favorite with many desert wildflower enthusiasts.
It's called ghost flower.
Believe it or not, it's in the same family as the monkey flower we just looked at, which
is the Figwort family.
I once had some amateur photographers follow me around for hours in hopes that I would
find a ghost flower for them to take a picture of.
It almost looks out of place in the desert.
I mean they really don't look like they belong here at all.
I hope you enjoyed this maiden visit to the Wild Gardens here in the Anza Barrego Desert.
This is a great place to visit as much for the rich desert scenery as for the wildflowers.
There's a beautiful visitor center here with an informed and very friendly staff to help
make your time here more memorable.
Remember don't pick or disturb any wildflowers and don't disturb any of the creatures that
live here.
We'll come back to the Anza Barrego Desert for a lot more wildflowers and a look at the
places they grow in.
May they grow until the turning of the earth ceases to be.
I'm your host, Martin Hale.
Until then, so long.