You know you haven’t been hiking or botanizing out in the desert or grassland enough when you look to the roadsides for interesting plants, but I’ll tell you what, if you keep your eyes open you’ll find some cool stuff mixed in with the weedy annuals, like the whiteball acacia I mention or milkweeds or coyote gourd or clematis. Sometime there are pure stands of native grasses like sideoats grama right after you pass a thicket Johnson grass, so it ain’t all bad.
Both camphor-weed (Heterotheca subaxillaris) and lizard tail (Oenothera curtiflora, the former Gaura parviflora) are native annuals and have a wide range across the United States. I can tell you that they are very happy in the jungle like mix of grasses and forbs growing along the two lane blacktops of Cochise County, Arizona.
The photos are mine of camphor weed along the road. The highway shot gives you an idea of the long runs of roadside weeds. That’s the Dragoons in the distance and the Chiricahua Mountains would be directly behind me.
I arrived in Tucson, Arizona in the fall of 1967 to attend the U of A. Up to that point I had been born...
This show about our garden is a “repetey” from a couple years ago. Some things never change, except, we have started using neem oil...
After reading the section about the canyon tree frog (Hyla arenicolor) in my old Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians by Robert Stebbins,...
